


stars to light the colony.

by the hyacinth girl (arguendo)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Bureaucracy, Canon Compliant, Emotional Infidelity, Local Man Spends 80000 Words Pining For The Robot Lion Who Dumped Him, M/M, Minor Acxa/Veronica (Voltron), Non-Endgame Curtis/Shiro (Voltron), Post-Series/Season 08 Finale, Slow Burn, Space Politics, Unrealistic Depictions of Intergalactic Diplomacy, no betas we die like mne
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-23
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:01:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 73,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27164935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arguendo/pseuds/the%20hyacinth%20girl
Summary: A midlife crisis goes right.
Relationships: Acxa & Ezor & Keith & Zethrid (Voltron), Keith/Shiro (Voltron), Shiro & Veronica (Voltron)
Comments: 49
Kudos: 79





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> happy birthday to one-half of the ship that will not let me go! i spent months trying to convince this fic that it should be a scorching hot infidelity fic filled with lots of porn. unfortunately my draft rebelled against me, and now it is ... the exact opposite of those things. expect one explicit sex scene in this monstrosity. i'm warning you in advance because nobody warned _me_.
> 
> updates once a week.

  
  
  
  
  


_He wants to be tender  
and merciful._ That sounds overly valorous.  
_Sounds like penance. And his hands?_  
His hands keep turning into birds and  
flying away from him. _Him being you._  
Yes. _Do you love yourself?_ I don’t have to  
answer that.

— richard siken, "unfinished duet".

  
  
  
  
  


Shiro felt the alarm before it struck.

It shivered through the conference room: a drip, a whisper, an invisible tide. Static spilled across the slideshow screen. The lights paled, then warmed again. In the belly of the ship, he knew, pistons were churning. Chambers firing like synapses. Oxygen whirling into hurricane wax. The Atlas breathed in and Shiro exhaled: two bodies drifting in a shared current of combustion sparks and adrenaline.

The first bell sang out. 

Secretaries and ministers stiffened along the table. At the head of the room, the Yfenaz delegate faltered, halfway through a fuming speech about abuses of governmental discretion in the regulation of dual-use imports. Every sound faded under the klaxon alarm. One by one, the delegates lifted their heads to the pulsing lights.

Shiro rose. Every eye jumped to him. "Everyone, stay calm," he said. "No one's under attack. This is just a IEP-3 alert. I'll be back with news in an hour." 

At the head of the table, he stopped, flicking a smile back to the Yfenaz delegate. A warrant-officer, he remembered—the youngest person assigned to that mission. "While you're here," Shiro said as they clutched their datapad to their chin. "Can you send a copy of your presentation up to the bridge? You did some great work—I'd like my crew to take a closer look at your points."

The doors slid apart, glittering. Shiro went out as the murmurs began.

It was early in the evening. Most of the day-shift crews were still shuffling down the halls, rumpled and slouched and chattering; but they belonged to the Atlas as much as he did. The crowds swayed open around his footsteps. Engineers snapped salutes as his shadow swept by. Along the walls, the lights were shifting. Crystals surged in their sconces, rolling with the glassy shimmer of warp-travel. The alarm was still ringing; its echoes drummed down to his fingertips, electric, relentless. 

He was halfway to the bridge. The crew would've scaled up the alarm level by now if it was an emergency. Whatever was coming, they'd thought that it wasn't worth calling him; but it was worth an unannounced warp.

Grey floors, gold numbers. Shiro turned a corner, and the Atlas stirred. He felt it like a wave, a dreaming force that could rewrite gravity. A whine threaded into the alarm's tinny chiming. Stars whipped into streaks through the pane. The floors shuddered as the Atlas steered into the warp; but Shiro didn't slow down. After five years, he knew how to move with his ship.

He came through the bridge doors at a dead run. Three alarms shrilled with outrage as he crossed the threshold: officers were meant to hold their places during warp-travel. At the secondary monitors, his communications officer bolted up from a furious round of whispers with Commander Iverson. " _Admiral_ ," Veronica said, pinching her glasses. "You didn't have to come up—this isn't an emergency."

"Neither was that meeting," Shiro said. The command console lit under his touch, a cool, pearled glow. "I'll get back to them. Brief me."

Veronica narrowed her eyes, every inch the woman who'd once torn stripes off of an envoy for trying to leave a Coalition meeting early. But she touched her collar, and slipped back into her seat. "We've been getting reports from a couple of sources." A map of the galaxy sprawled across the command monitors, planets beating in silvery strokes between a tangle of trade routes and teladuv gates. "Seven hours ago, a lone ship broke away from the trade route to Zugnaj-Mizoplax and headed right for the solar system. It kicked up to double the speed limit as soon as it passed Neptune. Going by the backtrace, it took an hour to get from the system's waypoint to Mars."

The flight-path sliced across his screen, a seamless curve that left no room for speed-burn or collisional cascading. "How'd it get through the asteroid belt?" Shiro said. "Doesn't look like it could take more than a couple hits."

"We're not sure. Its serial number's been blacked out, and the model registry isn't turning up any results. It's not responding to any requests for atmosphere clearance either." Veronica twisted, scrawling a flood of commands into her console. New windows bloomed across the viewscreen: a dozen transmissions of scattered stars, and a single black ship twisting from screen to screen like static. "The MFE patrol on Mars went out an hour ago, but I haven't heard any progress."

"Lieutenants," said Shiro. "Rizavi, Leifsdottir. Give me a status update. How're things looking?"

"Not good, sir!" Rizavi's shout rasped through the bridge speakers, grainy with distance. "That thing's fast! It keeps breaking through our formations. We think it's heading for Earth!"

In the mission chair, Iverson grunted, arms folded, every inch the training officer. He'd watched a thousand cadets break their wings on simulations like these. "If that's what it's up to, it'll have to ease up soon. Unless it wants to land in chunks."

"Iverson's right," Veronica said. "Look at that trajectory. It’s got less than an hour before it crashes into Earth's atmosphere, and it still doesn't have any visible shields. We can't handle that kind of impact."

The dark ship flew on, unfaltering. Through the MFE feeds, Shiro could see photovoltaic stripes and sleek, arching wings. It was an old corvette-ship—an outdated two-seat model with a rust-pocked hull, the kind that anyone with coffee money and access to a Lon-class junkyard could buy. But it was pulling away from them, stripes pulsing, winglets shuddering with new momentum as the planet swung into view.

Fifteen minutes ahead. Twenty. Shiro watched sunlight dazzling across its stripes, the incandescent turn of its wings. They'd let it come too close already. "MFEs, clear the path. We'll handle it from here." He glanced back. "Take out the wings."

At the munitions station, Curtis nodded. Alarms whistled through the bridge, a warning choir, as the cannons warmed. The MFEs went tumbling out of range in a synchronised curve.

"Twenty minutes to impact," Veronica said.

Curtis fired a rattling volley of hull-breakers; they flashed through the blackness like rain. The corvette wove through them, loop into loop. It doubled back in a silken, impossible twist. 

One by one, the missiles struck each other. A soundless shockwave went shattering through space.

"Admiral—"

"Don't," Shiro said. The corvette's manoeuvre flared through him, nerves and nails, a moth swooping through a starving flame. They didn't have time to dwell. "Stay on its tail. We've almost got it."

They plunged through the cloud of shrapnel. The corvette had lost some of its lead; but it was still flying. Through the glass, he caught the pearled, dusty gleam of the moon yawning wide. Everything was closing in: Earth was big enough to swallow half of the viewscreen now, a vision marbled with clouds and continents.

Ten minutes to impact.

The corvette swerved, and Shiro dug in against his station and veered after it. The Atlas groaned. A dozen alarms flurried through the bridge, whirling and wailing. It didn't matter. The corvette had counted on the Atlas's being too big to use the same tricks. The distance between them was burning up. He could see the stripes shivering with ghostly light, the shadow behind the cockpit's tinted shield—

"Admiral, _stop!_ "

The corvette fell.

For a heartbeat, he thought that they'd clipped it after all. But the corvette's dive swept into a controlled curve, and too late, he saw the reason that Veronica had shouted. The moon had sailed into their flight-path, just close enough to pull a battered little ship into its orbit. Slowing, neat as a knife, the corvette swung around the rim.

"Are you seeing what I'm seeing, Shirogane?" Iverson said quietly.

The Atlas drew back. Without a word, they watched as the corvette wove around the moon in widening rings. The third circle did the trick. The corvette pivoted, sliding into Earth's orbit in a narrow slingshot turn. Another heartbeat, thrusters brightening, and it was gone, riding the last burst of momentum as it fired into the atmosphere at a perfect landing speed.

Iverson caught his eye, and nodded. Shiro laughed.

He knew that manoeuvre. Every pilot at the Garrison did. They'd used his flight exams as a model for the simulation demo years ago.

"Admiral," Veronica said. "Permission to radio the Garrison—they can have three units out to the landing site in the next ten minutes. That should be enough time to mobilise the rest of the MFEs."

"That's a negative." Shiro smoothed over the console, tracing one of the standard command sequences. Every alarm dropped out; a hush rolled over the bridge. "Get one of our scout-ships ready. I'm heading out."

"Sir?"

"It's all right," Shiro said, smiling. His heart was thundering between his ribs; every vein lit with the rush of it, waiting for the storm. "I know who it is."

  
  
  
  
  


Alone, Shiro followed the intruder into the desert.

He'd taken the scout-ship out through the service hangars. The delay put him minutes and miles behind; but the corvette wasn't trying to hide. Its exhaust glowed through the scout's NDIR filters, a slender veil of algae smoke; the trail was an open invitation. Shiro traced its flight-path down to the inch, through every loop and swerve. He wove along the jagged golden seams of the plains—skidded off the cliffside and went plunging into the sunset, flying blind, body humming with adrenaline.

By then, he knew where the corvette had gone.

His scout-ship coasted to a stop at the lip of the plateau, where the desert crumbled away to blockfields and stripped red peaks. The corvette had perched on the stony outcrop, etched black against the rusty horizon. A figure was sitting on the wing.

Climbing out, Shiro braced himself against the frame. Heat lingered in the air, a gasping shimmer. The ache of it clumped in his throat. 

"Took you long enough, old-timer."

In the half-light, Keith burned like a mirage. Dusk had drawn a halo around him, flushed light and a crown of charred gold. He'd grown out his hair again; it fanned over one shoulder, a promise of fire brushing down the hollow of his throat. Shiro blinked, prickling with the instinct to drop his gaze. Nobody could take the sight of Keith like this. It was a vision that could only be kept and looked at through the lens of memory. The slope of his cheek, his arms, his heels kicking sparks along the wing. Sunlight caught between his lashes, all ash and fire. The tilt of his mouth as faint as a firefly-light, just warm enough to ache. 

The thought passed. Shiro tilted his head. "Is your engine supposed to smoke like that?" he said. "Hope you didn't strain anything, putting on that show for me."

"It's fine." Keith knocked on an aileron. If his brutal flying had bruised the ship, it didn't show; the corvette's thrusters glimmered through the half-light, all coal and spangling, purring like a machine that'd settled in to rest. "Not everyone gets to fly around in state-of-the-art Garrison tech."

"I don't appreciate you insulting my ride, Keith. That scout isn't _just_ state-of-the-art—it's a prototype."

"Sure," said Keith. Through the shadows, Shiro felt his smile. "A prototype with a thirty-minute lag."

He jumped down. Shiro tensed; the movement flashed through him, shivering with sparks. There was always a warmth about Keith's presence, a weight and radiant spark that no transmission had ever carried. "Hey," Shiro said, and it came out husky. "It's incredibly good to see you."

Keith's brows twitched. "I haven't been gone for that long."

A laugh glimmered between his ribs, then faded. "I know that," Shiro said.

It couldn't have been long at all. When they moved together, it was still easy. He reached out and Keith leaned into him, drawn like gravity: cheek against his shoulder, arms winding around him in a sure and familiar fit. They stood together through the sinking light, hearts pounding to a matched beat, as all the long months between them slipped away.

  
  
  
  
  


"I need you to introduce me to a Coalition representative," Keith said.

Shiro curled his fingers around his cup, a grounding gesture. They'd stopped, on a whim, at one of the old bars that Shiro remembered in Plant City—a favourite haunt for Garrison cadets on the cusp of graduation. The _Galileo Gallon-lager_ was smaller than it had been in his memory, a nest of sharp corners shrouded in desert grime and smoke. Years had bleached the ink from its old-fashioned sign, which now read: _Wine Small Step For A Ma ..._ But there was still the old jukebox in the corner, jewelled with dusty tracks and neon bulbs, and the hologram of some forgotten astropop star rocking his pixellated hips above the display; and their drinks came ringing full of ice, just as he remembered them: a raw, sweet burn all the way down.

"I thought you'd be meeting plenty of plenipotes," Shiro said, once he'd swallowed. "The last time I got a report from you, you were still helping the Blade of Marmora coordinate with newly independent planets. That's, what, a two-week flight from headquarters to Earth?"

"It's ten days, Shiro," said Keith, a little dry. "And that's only if you don't take shortcuts."

"Well, we all know how you feel about going slow."

That won him a smile, luminous as adrenaline. "Most of the people I see're from planets that just got into the Coalition," Keith said. The ghost of lamplight winked through his glass. "I need someone who can make deals on behalf of the Coalition. Someone who can handle themselves if things get rough."

Shiro rubbed his nape, thoughtful. They'd gone through the usual sweep of subjects without surprises: new Coalition treaties; the delicate turns of power inside the Blade of Marmora as Kolivan prepared for his retirement; the way Pidge still managed to send her latest prototypes to their exact locations every month, long after they'd stopped keeping reliable addresses. But this was different. "Did something happen on a mission?"

Keith scowled. He drained his glass. "Fertiliser happened," he said.

"Excuse me?"

They drank, and talked. Half the bottle was gone before he managed to put the details together. The Galra Empire'd had an armoury of tactics to keep their planets loyal. Hyperspecialisation had been the easiest. The process went like this: take one planet and strip it down to bone, razing every continent down to dust and gaping, hungry mines. Bring crops, then—as many roots and grains and salted meats as an army could carry across the light-years, a meal for every warm body willing to earn its right to see the next dawn. Keep trading as the planets remake themselves. Trade until the first planet's all hills of shining factories, and the second planet's tearing up its old concrete cities with bare hands to make space for new fields. Tell stories on each planet of all the places that had failed this test—worlds with flint knives and weak minds, worlds that hadn't learned what it took to be a part of greatness. Take their tongues, their children, the earth from under their feet; but leave them this: cold contempt, and the certainty that they'd earned their place in the universe.

_Heed the stories. Count yourself lucky. That could have been you._

The Galra Empire had shaped endless planets into factories and farms, then strangled every channel between them, leaving a trail of systems to strain and starve at the mercy of its army. There were still galaxies that had never known any other kind of life.

"Vro-Seiira-Geo used to be one of the Empire's biggest factory planets," Keith said. "But nobody knows what's been happening inside its system since Zarkon died."

"No one's tried a fly-by?"

"Their specialty's making shields. Every battleship in Zarkon's army used their technology. As soon as they heard about what happened at the Kral Zera, Vro-Seiira-Geo raised their barriers around the whole star-system. Only someone with a Galra warship code's supposed to be able to get through."

"A warship code," Shiro said, "or whatever your contact had."

He'd caught Keith by surprise. His eyes flickered, dark and startled, measuring where he'd given himself away; his smile bloomed, burning bright. "Yeah," Keith said. "We took a terraforming shipment out to this other planet a while ago. Siuegir. Things—got kind of complicated. The people who were staying on the planet didn't want our help. So," he rolled his shoulders. "I gave the shipment to the people who were leaving. They said they were flying out to Vro-Seiira-Geo, three systems away. I thought that was it. Then I got a message from them about a week ago, saying they needed a mediator."

The rest unfolded over his tongue with an old, familiar vertigo. Anyone who'd ever visited a new Coalition planet knew this story down to their bones. "You think the people you helped gave their shipment to Vro-Seiira-Geo in exchange for a place to stay," Shiro said. "And for some reason, Vro-Seiira-Geo isn't using it."

"Right now, I don't know anything," Keith said. "The message wasn't that long. I know the Siuegir want to stay where they are. But they can't do that unless Vro-Seiira-Geo figures out how to survive without the Empire."

Shiro knuckled at his glass, watching the dew glinting along his fingers. This was Keith; the problem wouldn't be what it seemed. "I'm guessing you have an invitation into the system already," he said. "You just don't know enough about the situation on the ground to guess how Vro-Seiira-Geo's going to take a sudden visit from the Coalition. So you want someone who can sign a binding contract to trade supplies if they have to, but you can't take a minister with formal military protections. And whoever it is, they have to be from a planet that Vro-Seiira-Geo's going to take seriously. Is that it?"

"I—thought all the Coalition representatives could sign off on trade contracts," Keith said. He prickled up, defensive, as Shiro lifted his brows. "Look, it'd make sense."

Shiro laughed. "Yeah, it would. But politics usually don't."

" _Is_ there anyone like that in the Coalition?"

Shiro breathed in, tasting whisky and stale incense; he met Keith's coalfire stare. It was a hard question. The Coalition was stable, but power shifted throughout its stars with every hour. Three planets might spend the better part of a year arguing about whether a trade agreement forged under Galra law could still be enforced—sabotaging each of the other planets' initiatives, demanding diplomatic immunity for every bandit who got caught with their flags while raiding one another's territories. It wouldn't stop them from turning, together, against the first hapless envoy who suggested that the Coalition sponsor a patrol along their borders. Alliances burned and burst like meteors every day, and left nothing but shrapnel behind.

But none of that would mean anything to Keith. 

Shiro raked through his hair. "Honestly?"

"Yeah?"

"I don't think it matters. Based on what you've told me, it sounds like Vro-Seiira-Geo doesn't just need a trade deal. Anyone who can't figure out how to use a load of _fertiliser_ 's either in deep trouble," he flicked over a half-smile, "or they're just talking a load of—"

" _Shiro_ ," Keith said; but he was laughing, and the sound shone in the warm air. His hair swayed over his eyes in an easy wave. Sweat glossed his jaw and the arch of his throat, a secret light between his collarbones.

Shiro swallowed again. His fingers twitched against the table. "'I'm just saying, if you don't need someone with an actual government position—I could always give it a shot."

He'd surprised both of them this time. Keith looked at him, bemusement soft between his brows. "What about the Atlas?"

"It's been a few years," Shiro said. He tried to find other words, but felt a pang when they came, thin as sea-salt to his tongue. "More than a few, actually. It'd be good to give the crew some practice running the ship without me."

"Why?" said Keith. "It's _your_ ship."

He was harder to read these days—older, all of his rough edges smoothed away to armour and brute control. But this was a tone that Shiro had never forgotten: heavy as a lion's shadow, echoing with ash and red canyon dust. On impulse, he bumped their shoulders together. "The Atlas needs more than one person to steer it, Keith. No matter how much experience they've had. I'd like to see what the crew can handle on their own. Besides," Shiro added, "I could probably use the chance to stretch my legs too."

Keith turned his head. "Well," he said, and shifted closer. Their arms slid against each other. Warmth crackled like static. "I guess—as long as you want to come."

"Trust me," Shiro said, low and helplessly light. "I wouldn't miss this for the world."

  
  
  
  
  


"Are you sure about this, Takashi?"

"The mission's just for a couple weeks," Shiro said, flattening a shirt over a portable solar-charger. "Curtis, you saw Keith fly that ship—the I-SP's actually pretty good. We can probably get to the system in a week, even without teladuv authorisation. I'll be back long before the Coalition summit."

"You haven't been away from the Atlas for longer than a few days since you started flying," Curtis said. His voice drew out, a thoughtful beat above the murmuring of the vitafilters. "He didn't have any other details about the mission?"

Keith had told him that Vro-Seiira-Geo was a long-settled planet; but _long-settled_ didn't mean much from a desert-boned boy who'd once lived for three days on raw cactus pads. Under the yellow glare of the closet lamps, Shiro gazed at the little mountain sloping out of his suitcase. "Look, you have nothing to worry about," he said, rolling one arm. "From the sounds of it, Keith's biggest problem for this mission's that it's _too_ boring for his branch of the Blades to deal with. And we'll have the rest of his crew with us. That's more than enough backup, even if something happens." 

"How does his backup compare to five giant cannons?"

"Well," Shiro said, "you've seen Keith in a fight."

"One mercenary isn't the same as a full ship's crew."

"He's a Blade, not a mercenary, Curtis." The conversation was half-automatic; Shiro was working through a rack of black trousers, feeling for something that could be comfortable but diplomatic. Memory flickered: heavy pillars, an empty conference screen, dozens of stiff-laced envoys protesting, _who would trust a Galra to notice any difference between the two?_ But that'd been years ago, and even now, his answer hadn't changed. "If I had to pick between Keith or an army, I'd choose Keith to stand with me against the end of the world."

"Do I get a vote?" said Curtis. "Because I'd like to vote for the option that doesn't come anywhere close to an apocalypse."

Trousers were swept off a hanger and into the suitcase; its vacuum lining sealed. Shiro looked back. Outside the closet's islet of light, the morning had barely broken. The suite lay in a drowsy tangle, half-shapes veiled in blue shadows. Against the wall, he could see the swell of a blanket as Curtis kicked and settled again, a nervous tide in the dreaming sea.

He left his case, hangers empty and boxes jutting askew, sinking onto the bed as Curtis sat up. Their knees knocked together. Shiro winced and laughed. He shifted over the bed, fumbling by muscle memory until his hand hooked over a hip. "Hey," he said. "You know you'll always have a vote in my book."

Curtis cleared his throat. His eyes were still hooded, fogged over, his whole body slow with sleep. "I'll assume that's supposed to be romantic," he said, and the rest fell away as Shiro kissed him, sour and lingering.

They hadn't talked much about his trip. He'd brought up Keith's mission as soon as he'd had the clarity to string words together—in bed, two days ago, sprawling under the ugly cloud of a morning hangover. It wasn't as if the Atlas couldn't spare its admiral; but supervisors would need to be told, meetings reshuffled, bribes scheduled for delivery to Veronica's work-station at timely intervals while Shiro was gone, lest she put bounty-prices on the whole Blade of Marmora out of spite for adding a two-week delay to all of her projects. Curtis had listened as he'd made his plans—had taken every step in stride. He hadn't thought that there'd been anything behind it.

His fingers drew down the chain of Curtis's spine in small, soothing spirals. "Come to think of it," Shiro murmured, "I know a great way to keep you distracted for the next few weeks."

"Do you mean—?"

"Yeah," said Shiro. "You'll be in charge of the Atlas while I'm gone."

Curtis had swayed close. His palm dug against the bed, startled. "I'll," he said. "Um. What?"

"I'm serious," Shiro said, smiling. "I'll get Veronica to sign off on the formal motion with me. You know Iverson—he won't complain if I skip over him when it comes to delegating command. You can try out the admiral's station for once. Test out every gun on-board, if you want. I know you've been wondering about them since the upgrade."

He stopped. Curtis was hunching against him, jaw drawn, shoulders sunken and tight. "The Atlas's artillery isn't the only part of the ship," he said. There was something restless about his voice, almost wounded. "I've never had to command the crew before."

The suite was still. The vitafilters had switched off for the day. Pane by pane, the windows were coming clear. Through the morning dazzle, he could see Earth laid bare beneath them, a silhouette lush with the dawn.

Curtis's answer shouldn't have surprised him. It'd been a while, but they were in Earth's orbit again. Earth, which was still finding its new shape after the war: new steel skyscrapers, yuzu flowering in perfumed orchards, glaciers left to drift through snowscapes untouched by industrial smoke.

He'd been afraid of this too, before. What failure here would mean. What would be left of him if this was gone.

"You don't have to," said Shiro. "I thought you'd want to try it out—that's all."

"Obviously I want to," Curtis said, thin as sand. "Anyone would. But _you_ aren't just anyone."

A laugh flickered between his ribs; but Shiro pressed it down. As if Curtis hadn't boarded the Atlas as soon as the Garrison had called him; as if they hadn't survived the same war. There were functions in its programming that only an officer with Altean technology could unlock; but they hadn't needed the transformation codes in years. In every skill that mattered, Shiro had learned the Atlas the way he'd learned any other Garrison ship: with instinct, study, and practice, burning hours at the altar of its battle-stations.

Another memory flashed through his bones: a lion's consoles gleaming in uneasy coalbeds around him, Keith's grip grinding against the controls. _I thought you were just delirious with pain. Why would you make me the leader?_

But commanding the Atlas was nothing like being a paladin. The war was over; the lions were gone. He had time, now, to go slow. There was nothing left for him to do that Curtis couldn't follow.

His fingers curved along Curtis's cheek, coaxing him close. "If you don't feel ready for this," Shiro said. "I won't push you. But you have to know that you won't be on your own while I'm gone. We've put a good team together on the bridge. I've watched you guys handle emergencies with barely any input from me. And if you really need my feedback, you'll be able to reach me by ansible for the whole trip. Whatever you decide, Curtis—things'll work out. All right?"

It was enough. Curtis smoothed a hand over his own chest; the heaviness in his face sank away. "Right. Of course you're right." He leaned in. His head bowed against Shiro's shoulder, resting in the hollow light as Shiro held his weight. "I'll do my best."

  
  
  
  
  


The doors opened to a vast emptiness.

Between missions, the landing deck ran with a skeleton crew; most of it didn't work mornings. The faceted screens glowed like ship-sails in a summer wind. In the pale arching distance, two technicians had perched on an electric cart, yawning as its wheels burred across the floor. An officer was standing at the farthest bay, where Keith's corvette hung like a shadow in suspension. She lifted her chin, ramming pins along the wings of her flyaway hair. A datapad drooped under one elbow.

"Veronica?"

Veronica twisted, and swept herself into a salute. "Nice to see you too, sir. Just wanted to get a few more things signed before you took off on your honeymoon."

It was barely seven by standard-time. Her sleeves were creased, her collar stiff with dog-eared corners—all the little signs of someone who'd slept on her console again and raced through the starching station like a cadet. Shiro raised his brows. "You know this isn't a honeymoon."

"Don't lie to _me_ , Admiral," Veronica said, rapping the datapad. "I know you don't take vacations."

He took the datapad, skimmed through the line of holos that she'd pinned into place, and began to scrawl his signature across the pages. "You'll have plenty of time to rile up Curtis while I'm gone, you know. You don't need to practice on me."

"Are we talking about the same Curtis? Please. You could be in space for the rest of your life and it still wouldn't be enough time."

"So he's got a level head and a good working relationship with his colleagues," Shiro said, amused. "Sounds like potential commander material to me."

Veronica clicked her own pen—a bright swoop of alien steel, sleek as a scimitar, a gift from some faraway market he'd never heard of; it wrote on paper and screens alike, and never ran dry. "Hm," she said. Her gaze flicked to the corvette, measuring its brittle wings, the jagged scar of laserfire across its hull. "Did the Blades trade down? I thought I remembered him driving something bigger."

"Keith said they had some problems while they were finishing their last delivery contract," Shiro said. There was a wary tender look about Keith's ship, perched beside the glossy Garrison models with its frayed stripes and stone-beaten hull. "One of the Bol-class systems passed a new regulation last year. I guess ships above a certain size can't fly the common trading routes inside the system unless they're registered with the Coalition or they're carrying bulk cargo."

"Mm, a few of them are doing that." Veronica cocked a hip as she took back her datapad. "So exactly what _is_ Keith's deal? Is he worried that he doesn't have the contacts in the Coalition to fast-track his ship registration?"

"I think he just doesn't like paperwork," Shiro said; but he was smiling. Even outside of her shift hours, Veronica had a mind like a catalog. If she could observe something, she could trim and shape and log it for the Atlas's tireless databanks. At some point, they'd have to talk about that, but not now. "Luckily, Vro-Seiira-Geo's system isn't that far. Acxa, Ezor, and Zethrid'll probably make it out to us next week with their usual ship."

Veronica rolled her neck in brisk snaps. "That's what I like to hear. My boss swearing that he's only spending one week without backup in unsecured territory instead of a whole month. Any signals?"

"Let's stick with the standard duress codes for now," Shiro said, crushing back a yawn. "If we're gone for longer than three weeks, you can reach out to the Blade of Marmora headquarters. Krolia has some experience with getting Keith out of hostile situations."

" _Who_ 's being hostile?" 

The hush cracked with a shout. 

Rizavi draped over Veronica's shoulders, laughing in giddy, ringing bursts while Veronica yanked at her clinging weight. Somewhere in the conversation, the bay doors had parted. Officers were piling into the landing bay, knuckling away their yawns in their pristine uniforms; in the corridor, he could see one lieutenant hopping to slide on her boots, swilling hot coffee from cheek to cheek. One by one, they filed past him; their crowd split across the floor, lining the way up to Keith's ship. 

He knew every face. The engineers, tousled but sleek in their grey coats, swaying to and fro in a shared pre-caffeine daze. The communications officers with their delta pins winking gold on every lapel. The MPSR envoys, currently leading the ship for collective number of dress code infractions, standing bolt-straight in uniform with crisp new stripes. The MFE pilots scattered through the lines, figures gleaming from boots to caps, alight with pride. These were the officers that worked with the bridge on every mission—the voices at the end of every call, the scout-ships that cleared each new field for the Atlas's descent.

Curtis craned out from the head of the line. "Surprise," he said. 

Shiro went forward in slow steps, drifting through the landing bay as if through glass. "What's the occasion?"

"Veronica brought it up yesterday," said Curtis, "and we all thought, _why not_. You never let us see you off anywhere. We might as well give you a show the one time it happens."

Yesterday. When they'd still been flying full-tilt through his leave procedures, three staff meetings crammed back-to-back, switching between ansible calls with senators from two planets flung light-years apart. His crew had thought of him, and they'd given him this.

He looked at them: the polish and wonder of their ranks, collars turned sharp, hands pressed to their brows in a shining salute. In the new hush, he couldn't think of a thing to say.

Behind him, the corvette's doors rasped apart. Footsteps thudded down the bridge. Shiro turned, and found Keith standing on the ramp, dressed and ready in his Blade armour. His gaze swept over the military display. "Uh," said Keith, folding his arms. "Is this ... a party?"

"Keith," Shiro said. The sound twisted in his chest, a sketch of air; his heartbeat stuttered with its weight. "Just saying some goodbyes before we head out. We won't be out here for long."

But Keith was still looking at the crew. Something in his face shifted—a hardness to his jaw, a light skimming down the turn of his cheek. "Take your time," he said, and turned away.

Before he reached the frame, Shiro'd clasped his shoulder. Tension guttered beneath his fingers, a little candle-flame, then snuffed out. "Come on," he said, as his suitcase came floating up behind him. "Aren't you going to give me the tour?"

He waved off his crew, and followed Keith into the ship.

The cabin was bigger than he'd expected. The controls curved around two pilot seats in a glossy array. Pixels bloomed and waltzed across the screens in black and violet, visions from a dreaming system. By habit, Shiro sank into the leftmost seat. A new hologram came flowing through the glass: asteroids and mirror-cold planets, system after system scrawled with alien insignias across a silvery grid dusty with stars. A flight-path sliced across the map: a clean arc from Earth to a faraway system. Five planets swept through a complicated, tangling pattern around two brimming suns. Its third planet had been marked: _Vro-Seiira-Geo of the Veniwar system_ , like a gem studded in glass.

"How many people do you have on the Atlas?"

Shiro started. Keith had braced along the back of his own seat, brows furrowed, as if he were working through a private equation. "Not that many, for Earth's flag-ship," Shiro said. "We formed the judicial subdivision last year, so it's probably—about five thousand now? It's a good thing not all of them showed up today."

He stopped. The question that'd been furling in his ribs dissolved. They'd lived out of each other's pockets for so long. From the Kerberos shuttle, Keith's silhouette had been the last earthbound thing that he'd seen. They had built Voltron together, a matched pair in red and black. He knew the shape of Keith's mouth in fury, grief, and joy. It was hard to think that there was anything about him that Keith hadn't seen to the core.

"It's not that many, once you get used to it," Shiro said, softer. "I'll introduce you to some of them when we get back. I think they'd like you."

It was the right answer. Keith's fists knuckled, then loosened. "Sounds like a plan," he said.

He dropped into the seat, tapping through the preflight protocols in an easy, memorised sequence. The engines droned beneath them, assembly reels and thermal systems skittering online. There was a glint beneath Keith's dark lashes, a static that crackled in his spine. "You ready to go?"

Shiro laughed, turning forward. "With you?" he said. "Always."

  
  
  
  
  


The first few days went by in a scattershot rhythm. Shiro took ansible transmissions at all hours, dressed in his full admiral's finery, to sign off on last-minute treaty amendments from the Atlas. Keith flew them along the outskirts of old imperial systems. From unsettled space, peace looked like nothing more than a new kind of wreckage in slow motion. The corvette sang past fields of crumbling satellites and ashy cruisers, careening through an empire's shattered heart and out to a new era.

In the empty hours, they told each other stories like landmarks. Light-years away, there was a system where three stars had clustered together against the curious claws of a black hole, their orbits looped by a single chancy asteroid. There, on the outskirts of the map, the Atlas had negotiated between ten commanders, each of whom had crowned themselves Zarkon's heir. Keith had been a galaxy away then: on a balmy world, more flowers than soil, to harvest some of its earth for a terraforming shipment. That had been a rough mission. He'd flown out with five scavengers riding his tail, and a cargohold crammed with sandstone and rich pink loam. 

It was Keith's scowl, telling the story, that undid him. Shiro collapsed into his seat, laughing. "Well," he said. "I've heard that shipping goods is a dirty business. Guess I never realised _how_ dirty."

"You're not funny," Keith said, and slung a ration-pack at his nose.

But there was always more to tell. The corvette was a cradle of memories and off-handed secrets. It'd been one of Zethrid's rare victories—her trophy from a poker game with the service crew at the junkyard. They hadn't discovered until months later that the junkyard had switched out a few parts. The area fan wouldn't trigger unless the window screens were down. The command and service console had five different buttons that were labeled as safety valves and auxiliary brakes, but which only raised broadcast antennae when struck. 

"What about these?" Shiro said. He tapped a row of modulator-knobs, curving around the claws and bitemarks; several symbols had been torn off already. "Did the wolf do this?"

Keith glowered at the radar screen. "Ezor," he said.

"Ezor ate your console."

"Zethrid convinced her that the wolf was trying to stake out territory on the ship. So Ezor decided to mark the cockpit before he could get to it."

A contradiction burned in the air: half-irritation and half-wonder. "I see," Shiro said, and didn't smile. He pinched his uniform collar smooth. "I'll try not to touch anything I'm not supposed to after they show up."

"Show up?"

Keith had jolted up from his seat. Shiro met his gaze, and held it. "Aren't they meeting us on Vro-Seiira-Geo?"

"No," Keith said. He hadn't tensed; but there was something about the sling of his shoulders, the pale, lean flex of his jaw, swallowing. "I thought I told you—this is my assignment. Just mine."

Shiro gripped his seat. For a moment, it seemed as if he were still listening to a transmission, two frequencies mingling from separate galaxies. "I guess I misunderstood," he said.

Keith stared; then, without warning, his head snapped forward. "No. I wasn't clear enough." He touched a quick reel of controls. A sheaf of mission papers spilled across his screen: a map of a new star-system, three crisp, curt profiles, and a holoprint smeared with the Coalition insignia. "We promised Zuel-Vek that we'd run their circuit in the next couple days. They've been getting people flying through their system, saying that they're collecting taxes for the Coalition."

"The Coalition doesn't have taxes."

"That's probably why they're saying it from a loaded warship." Keith leaned over, adjusting the blade-pitch controls. "Their mission shouldn't take that long. I can tell them to run the warship down and fly back out to meet us. We can handle the situation on Vro-Seiira-Geo together before they turn it in to the authorities."

There was something more to the offer—a weight, a shadow. He didn't understand it, but he didn't have to. Part of keeping up with Keith was finding the question beneath the moment. What he'd asked, and what he meant. "Keith," Shiro said, and it was as simple as starlight, the swing of a ship in orbit. "I trust you."

There was no answer; but Keith breathed into the quiet, and the maps folded out across the screen.

He didn't think about it again for days. The stars flowed by; the corvette went drifting through the galaxies as if on a wave. In his off-hours, Shiro sifted through storage lockers, skimmed old mission files. There was a resonance in everything he touched, a breathlessness, as if the brush of his fingertips might stir echoes louder than he could take. 

No, Shiro thought. The other way around.

He made his way back to the cockpit, tugging at the collar of his admiral's jacket. Keith was still holding steady, watching the open universe ahead. Station lights rippled over his lashes, the prickle along his jaw, the glossy arch of his wrist reaching across the console. A universe tangled in his shape and heartbeat.

"It's been a long time since we've done something like this," Shiro said. "Hasn't it."

Keith glanced up. His face lit with soft, uncomplicated warmth—clear as dawn breaking across the desert. "Yeah," he said. "It has."

Shiro settled into his own seat again. The ship lay mute beneath them; no matter how he listened, there was nothing but the whir and beat of any mechanical system at rest. He twitched a shoulder, then started to unbutton his coat. He'd made all the calls he'd needed to make; the uniform wouldn't do any good until after they'd landed, if then. He didn't need it here. It was only him and Keith.

  
  
  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

  
  
  
  
  


Vro-Seiira-Geo came into view like a vision cast in amber.

They passed through the system shields without incident, taking turns to steer through Veniwar's standard passage protocols. Keycodes jittered in the background. Heat flared across the ancillary screens, a smear of starlight—and then they were hurtling forward, swooping in bright rings around an unfamiliar planet.

"Shiro," Keith said. Shiro started, then settled back in his seat.

"Right," he said. His fingers flexed, rue glowing in the marrows of his bones. "I'm focused."

They worked through the landing protocols in silence, watching as Vro-Seiira-Geo formed in a slow crescendo. Oceans scattered. A freckled continent went sprawling into a desert, rounded bluffs and open plains armoured with colossal, shining panels. Towers swayed across the sand, and far, far below, a landing strip lay gleaming, rich as beaten gold.

The corvette thumped down. Shiro started with its impact, grinding along the strip. They stopped at the threshold of a panel. The engines faded; breath by breath, the artificial atmosphere slipped away. The gravity swept lower, lighter. Enough to feel the glow in his bones, his pulse winging through his veins. 

Shiro rose, and went out. 

The new air flooded his teeth like saltwater. The day was burning with all the force of two suns. The plains and slopes seemed to melt down to bleak and endless salt, a sea without end. Shiro stopped on the ramp, shielding his eyes. Somewhere in the dazzle, a hand clasped his arm; but Keith was gone by the time Shiro could see again—swinging himself under the belly of the corvette, heading to check the engine.

A post-flight check didn't take two pilots to run. Shiro wended around the ship and through the staggering daylight. Heat pounded through his arms, his ribs, his pulse, clearing the blindness away. The miles stretched empty around them. Through the distance he could see little shelters of sand-scrubbed tin, towers jutting along the sand like spokes from a broken wheel, and faint, rumbling clouds.

He headed back to the bow of the ship, knocking at the hull. "Anything you want to tell me before we get started?" 

"About what?" Keith said, with the tetchy distraction of someone struggling to remember his first-year radiator workshop. "You read the mission file."

"I did," Shiro said. "But the file didn't tell me that an envoy would start charging at us when we showed up."

" _Keithlir!_ "

The call shone through the glaring sun.

A thump rang through the corvette. Startled, Keith ducked back out as the envoy came barreling out of the haze—a silhouette half his size, all slender claws and feathered ruff, moving with electric speed. Shiro bolted towards them; but Keith was quicker. He caught the envoy in his arms. They twisted through the sand together in wild circles. The stranger was whooping, bright as a hunting bird. 

"You're lucky I'm wearing armour," Keith said, frowning.

He set the envoy on xir feet. At once, xe slung xir arms around Keith's ribs. "And you are lucky that I'm not an enemy!" the envoy cried. "What shill sold this dreck to you, eh? You should be writing their names out as a warning to every trading partner you've got. Emblazon their shame across the stars!"

"I know you know what the Blade of Marmora does," said Keith, dry as daylight. "At least the armour fits."

"Mindless faith in tradition is the deadliest virus! That polymer is a thousand years past its expiration date. I could crack your bones to pulp in the time it took you to—" Xe smiled. "Well, gut me like an animal, to be sure."

"We talked about this, Aaklir. There are no funny murder jokes."

"Tsa-ah. I am an engineer! _Funniness_ is not an advantage in our profession, regardless." The envoy's eye darted back to Shiro, slitted grey and keen as a compass needle. Xir wrist hooked against Keith's back, guarding. "Now what is your excuse?"

"Aaklir! _Aaklir_!"

The rest of the cloud had caught up. Two more envoys circled Keith, steel-skinned and towering, their throats ringed with the same glossy ruff. Each hooked one of Aaklir's ears with the firm grace of long practice. "What ever possessed you," one said. It pinched harder as Aaklir squirmed; its voice swelled, swinging through the shrill, whistling range of an outraged teapot. "We reported the atmosphere breach of his ship ourselves, didn't we, so it's common respect to wait for—"

"Oh, _mind_ yourselves, would you!" said the other envoy. "Vro-Seiira's coming now." 

"Perhaps I would mind myself better if people weren't always minding _me_ , Nvesak, Shakva! Ouch—"

Their bickering crackled, then folded back like a paper play. A flick, and the envoys shuffled into a single line, shoulder to shoulder, faces swept blank as pages. Sieugir, Shiro thought. They were Siuegir. The puffed collars stark as paint, the claws drawn to points slim as filigree, their pin-scar pupils trailing along the sand. Their echoes like steel and cement. He knew them.

Unthinking, he followed their gaze. What he'd taken to be a shelter had deepened into a stairwell. A shape was surfacing out of it in scraping, heavy steps.

"I see we have passed the stage for formalities," said the prime minister of Vro-Seiira-Geo.

Even without the mission file, he couldn't have mistaken her for anyone but the leader: dusky, thick-set, with gold eyes and a close-trimmed crown of dark hair. She wore her own muscle like fur, or armour; the three Siuegir, each stacked head to heels, would have barely seen over her head. Pale, rich linen hung from her body, each layer as slight as an afterthought.

She crossed the landing strip in strides as shadows bloomed behind her, calling orders to the masked troop following behind. Shiro listened; but the sounds pooled in his ears, as mazy as wine: _guns down, face, shield—_

"Shiro," Keith said, testing. Shiro nodded. 

If he was careful, he could hear the language that strung through her speech—a cast-iron Galra dialect, syllables fired like cannons. But it came to him like colours through a faded screen: a memory that had to be pieced together before it could be seen.

It happened, now and again, with the older imperial systems. Zarkon had learned the logistics of conquest early. No army could murder on schedule without rations, weapons, and transportation. Any prisoner could be trained to manufacture those things without words; but prisoners who understood instructions and threats worked faster than prisoners who didn't. Over millennia, the Galra had patched microbes, genetic programs, and mysteries into a viral translation system, and slung it like a net across the stars. It had held in some places, and withered in others. There were planets whose universal language had outlived the Galra Empire; and then there was this. 

"We have been remiss," the prime minister was saying in her leaden dialect. Behind her, the soldiers bolted into place, large and small, mismatched and endless—a troop of blades against the daylight. "We thought that our home had nothing left to interest outsiders. Speak. What can Vro-Seiira-Geo offer a paladin of Voltron?"

"We're not here to collect offerings," Keith said. Each word could have carved through a minefield. "And there are no paladins. Not anymore."

The prime minister's eyes hooded. "It is the privilege of a paladin to choose any title he likes, I suppose," she said. "So?"

Five years had taught Keith certain lessons about irony. His arms locked over his chest, a bristling anchor. "Look, I didn't come here to argue," he said. "We need your cooperation. Eight months ago—"

"Eight months ago," Shiro said, ringing clear as ice, "I realised how much I needed a vacation."

Every head swung towards him. At the head of the troop, a soldier laughed then caught himself, and crushed his smile into a fist. His cheeks flashed above his half-mask, silicon studs prickling in constellations.

"Sorry," Shiro said. He clasped Keith's arm; his human hand curved out, palm up, under the prime minister's narrow stare. "I should've introduced myself before we landed. Admiral Takashi Shirogane."

Keith stiffened, bones and sinews thrumming with an old reflex. But he stilled. Their shadows slid together, two wings beating together through the sandswept light. Vro-Seiira looked at each of them in turn, a woman with nothing but time to burn. "Earth's representative," she said at last. "You spoke to us, once."

The words reached him just as the memory did. A breathless crowd, a day as grey as pewter. He hadn't learned until later how many long-lenses had been trained on him through the throng—the audio recordings and grainy footage that'd gone singing across the galaxies in the hours after he spoke, a shared anchor to hope. _Many have been lost, but not in vain. Because through their sacrifice, many more will live on._ He'd stood on the platform in a uniform clotted with starch, thinking of nothing but the next line and the next—voice winding out of his throat as if on a chain, pulling him towards the end of the war. 

_I’m making this promise now. We will return. Triumphant._

"I'm honoured that you remember me," Shiro said slowly. "My life's changed a lot since that broadcast."

"Has it?" said the prime minister. "You were a peace-maker then."

Years ago, he wouldn't have known how to answer her. But they'd been long years: endless litanies of state visits, subcommittees, treaties where protections were shuffled like cards and came up as leverage. Shiro rolled his left shoulder. "This seems like a misunderstanding. I've been working pretty much non-stop as Earth's representative in the Coalition since the end of the war. So, when Keith showed up in the Atlas's neighbourhood, I asked him to take me traveling for a while. As a personal favour." His grip tightened, and Keith swayed into the touch. "The important thing is: right now, Keith and I are both off-duty. We're just here to visit a friend of his. No matter what we see here, it won't affect the decisions that I make in my official capacity."

Nothing stirred but the sand.

The prime minister glanced away; she traced her collar with some dense, unreadable sign, as secret as prayer. "I understand," she said. Under the unflinching light, her eyes glittered full of stars. "It is an honour to meet you, Takashi Shirogane. I am Vro-Seiira."

  
  
  
  
  


The problem with politicians: they thought of everything as political.

Vro-Seiira hadn't asked for their company; she didn't want them on her planet. But protocol dictated that an alien representative must be entertained, and so she did. She kept them with her—through the introductions, the settling of Keith's ship in a governmental hangar, a hasty meal of frozen sweetwater fruits—until the second sun had crossed the heart of the sky. In the end she let them go on a chain of promises: a tour of the planet, an invitation to the seasonal festival, standing access to any ship in the hangar. Guards led them to the guest tower, a porcelain shadow over the northern-most panel. They went up through the service elevator and into the suite.

Keith went in first. Shiro watched as he swept across the floor, a device ticking in one hand. The rooms reeked of polish. A bed rested below the square windows, draped in linen, pillows glowing cool as cream. Artificial lights dazzled along the borders of the glass, rising like mist from some city out of sight.

Keith turned, beckoning. Shiro stirred. "Is getting bugged normally a problem for you?"

"'Normal' doesn't exist in space," said Keith, a little dour. His mouth crooked as Shiro laughed.

He knelt on the bed. From the tower windows, the desert burned like a coin slung into fire. The first sun had slipped over the horizon hours ago; the skies shimmered with the eerie flush of early night. Twilight drew vast scaled patterns across the panels below, making streets and hieroglyphs out of wheel-scratches, pulling green shadows over the jeweled world.

"So," Keith said. "What happened back there?"

The question needed no translation. "Vro-Seiira knew we were coming," Shiro said. "The Siuegir told her as soon as we breached the system shields, didn't they."

"Yeah," said Keith, with a crisp, puzzled glint. "They were supposed to. Vro-Seiira-Geo hasn't disarmed yet—their cannons could've taken us out."

"She knew that we'd show up in an unregistered ship. But she still called her guards together so that she could meet us in formation when we landed." Shiro shifted along the bed; his drifting arm settled on the sill. From the corner of his eye, he could see Keith in the glass—the jut of his elbows, his hair in windblown tufts, a vision of cut-glass nostalgia. "Some of the older Galra planets can be pretty traditional about how they deal with off-worlders. The things they're allowed to say to a plenipote on vacation might not be the same things they're allowed to say to one on a mission. I think this is one of those planets."

"Does that matter?"

"That depends. Are we counting on her people to figure out what happened to that terraforming shipment?"

He glanced back. Keith's brows twitched; his weight thumped against the bedframe as he grimaced. "So Vro-Seiira knows that you're from the Coalition. And we know that she knows. But we're not going to make any deal about trading until we know what Vro-Seiira-Geo's doing with the supplies."

"The supplies," said Shiro, "and the people who live here."

They watched the dunes wither and rise. He couldn't remember the last time the world had been so muted. The Atlas would have been ringing at this hour: the noise of cadets in the dining hall, officers stumbling out from their shifts—and under the radiant cacophony of his crew, the sounds of a ship dreaming through deep space. Drift tubes, docking ports, antennae crackling with stories of life across the stars.

Shiro closed his eyes. His pulse drummed in his ears. "How much do you know about Vro-Seiira-Geo?" he said. "And I don't mean the information we put in mission files. Have you ever met someone from here?"

"Not really. Back when we left xir planet, Aaklir sounded pretty sure xe wanted to come here. That was as close as I got."

"Aaklir." The shape of xir dazzled in memory—the bird-quick turn of xir cheek, hair pinned in polished loops down xir spine, a lilting grin in a sober grey jacket. "Is xe a friend of yours?"

Steps whispered along the floor. The mattress dipped as Keith settled onto it. "I didn't know xir for that long," he said. "And that's not why xe called me."

"Huh. Then why did xe call?"

"Xe thought I could help them," Keith said. "Not just xir. Everyone who left with xir. Their planet's never going to take them back. I was probably the only choice they had."

There was a kind of stung pride in the words, and something else: a rawness and a restless edge, a knife's point feeling for a soft place to sink deep. "Keith," Shiro said. "Listen to me—we're going to get them what they need. All of them. All right?"

Keith lifted his chin. "You always say that," he said, rueful and nearly smiling, an echo from years long gone. "I know we are."

He climbed onto the bed. Shiro eased back, clearing a space at the windowsill. The skies had darkened. The panels whirled like fading seas; the distant towers shone as if mantled by fire. They might have been on Earth again—and the thought twisted dry in his teeth. Shoulder to shoulder, skin prickling with new salt, laughing at the lands below. A world out of reach. A memory so close that he could almost brush its nape.

"Shiro—"

An alert shrilled.

Keith tensed, but Shiro touched his arm. "It's all right," he said. With his steel hand, he tapped his lock-code into the smartpin on his lapel. "It's just reminding me that it's 2100 on the Atlas. I promised Curtis that I'd call him when his shift was over."

Keith's mouth pinched, as if pinning a thought between his teeth. "Did you," he said, "let Curtis get a dog yet?"

That startled him. Shiro laughed. "He's been talking about that for years. Don't tell me he finally got someone else on his side."

Keith scrubbed at his hair. "It's the only thing we've ever talked about," he said.

Each word thrummed down his spine; their echoes faded before he could speak, lost to something like translation, distance, memory. His left hand knuckled against his thigh, uneasy under its gold. "Well," Shiro said softly, "next time he asks you, you can tell him that it's still not a good time." 

The smartpin bristled and lit, a strobing light. The purr of the ansible connection rolled through the room. 

Shiro raised his head. The room was unraveling into shadows, hard corners and graceless green silhouettes. In the rusty quiet, Keith had already risen, heading for the door.

  
  
  
  
  


In the morning, a scribe-bot came to the guest tower for their tour.

Their autocart took the long way out to the control tower, raking clouds of dust along the eyeless miles. The surface shone with the sheer, simple blaze of a wasteland. Daylight slurred across the panels as if through a syringe. Vro-Seiira-Geo had started as a mine and a generator planet, the scribe-bot said. The Galra had built to reinforce its low gravity and bleak climate. Over centuries, the factories had spun out from those hollow spaces. Each panel covered a factory, which ran for miles below the earth. These factories were the pride of Vro-Seiira-Geo. They had once made everything that a ship could need to conquer. In the blinding heart of summer, the photosynthetic panels alone could keep the factory systems alive for eighty days.

They listened; they waited; and when it was over, a soldier stood waiting for them at the hangar.

He stood, bent at the waist, as they came. Gone was the stark uniform of the troops. He'd dressed in full regalia: claws striped by gold-leaf, cheeks studded with crystalline implants, a high chitin collar that glittered like a sheath. The soldier in Vro-Seiira's troop, Shiro remembered—the one who'd laughed when they'd landed. 

The soldier's bow deepened as they climbed out of the cart. His fingers fanned over the chromium stripe that plated his throat. "Qival," he said, and rose. He'd stripped off his troop's mask. Wire rolled with his smile, threaded like veins between fine, fading scars. "An honour, great honour, and all that."

He twisted away in a clean stroke, heading up to the waiting ship.

Shiro looked at Keith, who stared back. "I guess Qival's excited to get moving," Shiro said.

"If he tries anything," said Keith, grim-mouthed, "I brought survival rations and a knife."

They climbed the steps together. In any other part of the universe, the ship would have been a non-descript cargo-carrier: a heavy-bellied whale whose only scars came from the day that its keeper had scrubbed off all its black-and-purple paint. On Vro-Seiira-Geo, it dazzled—an artifact, a miracle, a merchant-class flyer on a planet cut off from the drift of time.

Qival had already started the preflight protocols. The carrier was more complicated than it looked; his hands rolled across the console in a gaudy, reverent symphony. "Either of you thought about where we're taking this tour first?" he called as the carrier murmured, quickening. "Gladiator pits? Meat grinding factory? Lab for testing on live subjects?"

The words pounded through his ears. Shiro turned, pressing the door shut; his palm clung to the console as the seal hissed shut. "I missed that, just now," he said. "Mind repeating whatever you said?"

Qival cracked his jaw. "Just my little joke, is all," he said. He used a neat, burring dialect that was common in commercial systems. If any accent had ever touched his voice, time had clipped the sound away. "C'mon up, sit anywhere you want. Don't worry about the rest. If you trust me, I know a good sight for tourists."

Keith touched his arm, a dark-eyed restraint.

In the end, they settled together into a single wide, flaking pilot's seat, thigh tense against thigh. The fans whirred as they rose. An old-fashioned vitafilter rattled, sliding over the windows, shading the dunes below into a dreamy mist. In silence, Shiro watched as the land crumbled into black, glassy plains, as cliffs fell and surged into a bleak new shape.

There were no trees.

The land stretched on and on, yawning crevasses woven with seething porcelain towers. What he'd taken for oceans on first entry were empty—dry, bleached stretches where the land had been blasted bare. The wastelands drank sunlight like salt, drawing a halation out of the shores where the true desert began. Here and there, they passed over boxy cities with streets dense as silicon boards, and cracked reservoirs haunted by lightless spires. The Galra insignias which marked the stones had been blasted into smears; their windows lay crusted green and white as rotting cartilage, the seabeds of them littered with debris and pools of dust.

"Are all of those," Keith said, "cities?"

"Don't pay those no mind," said Qival. "They got dumped centuries back. Millennia, maybe. Empire figured out that we'd be neater about our work if we specialised. Nobody could live in 'em now if they tried." He flicked his tongue against a cheekstud; the gem winked and blazed. "It's all right, though. War's over. They say we've got a bright new future ahead of us."

It was an ordinary, everyday platitude; but something about the way Qival talked ground sparks across his nerves. Shiro turned towards the window. All the rivers and rises of an ordinary landscape had been razed away, reframed. Narrow straits cross-hatched the earth. In the crevices, he could see ash crumbling, the thick, clumping rock where lava might once have come churning through. Only dust bloomed across the land now, mottling the plains like bruising. A planet crushed down to fit the universe around it.

He glanced back, and found Keith still watching Qival, brows pinched, mouth tight. His knee pressed Keith's. "Recovery's hard," Shiro said aloud; it was the easiest neutrality he knew. "Just because it's taking a while doesn't mean it isn't happening."

Qival snorted. He caught the controls as the ship shuddered. "If we aren't taking twice as long as we should, you could gut me and hang me with my own intestines."

"Uh," said Shiro. "That's a little harsh."

"It's all right, all right," Qival said. He mimed a stab, then an intricate six-fingered movement that suggested viscous dripping. "I'd grow another. See, we're taught resilience, us Daq."

"I appreciate that you felt the need to tell me that," said Shiro.

Qival cocked a glance backwards. "I'm not saying Kuzrel doesn't have her excuses for this mess," he said. He had an airy patter that Shiro didn't quite understand, setting out facts like a man planting pieces across a board. "She's been hard up, after the war. Her worker count went down by half. All the best supervisors in her factories got bumped up to her cabinet. The only loyalists who aren't in government now're commanding Vro-Seiira-Geo's army. And you know army-folk—they aren't happy 'til they've got somebody to watch."

"You mean they're watching the Siuegir," Keith said.

Aaklir hadn't come to them alone. He remembered that. At the landing, xe'd been flanked by a troop, masked soldiers dressed in jarring colours, like violets and crude oil. _I'd mind myself better if people weren't always minding me_. They'd been so careful to frame it as a courtesy.

Shiro breathed. "You're being pretty helpful," he said above the drumbeat in his ears. "Are you saying she took the Siuegir in to keep her troops distracted?"

Qival narrowed his eyes. In his gaze, Shiro felt the echoes of their voices: Keith's and his, beat and counterbeat, tangling low. "I don't know how Kuzrel thinks these days," said Qival. "Not since she got bumped up to Vro-Seiira. But I know how she's treating the refugees."

"Meaning _what_ ," said Keith.

"Give 'em a visit sometime. You'll see." Qival cracked his broad neck. Sunlight shattered across his barbed piercings. "Those kids have to call on diplomatic privilege just to get foods delivered after sunset. If they want to want to leave the tower for more'n a couple hours, they leave with my guards on 'em, and never in more than groups of two or three."

_My guards_.

He was watching them from the corner of his eye, with a glitter that felt more than half-malicious; this was as much of a test as a chance for honest answers. A question curled in Shiro's throat, on the brink of taking shape.

But Keith leaned out from the seat first. "How many guards from Daq are there on Vro-Seiira-Geo?" he said.

The flyer was silent. Islands went drifting below them, wind-eaten plateaux trembling in seabeds charred dry. " _From_ Daq," Qival said. His smile curled like sparks sizzling across a hearth. "Aw, you got the wrong idea. We didn't come running to Vro-Seiira-Geo for cover when the war got started. Us Daq, we came from all over the galaxies to be Vro-Seiira-Geo's blade. And we gave 'em everything she asked for."

That struck something in him, an echo like stirring shrapnel. "The war's been over for a long time," Shiro said.

Qival whistled, a drawn-out siffle. "Yeah, right, yeah," he said. Abruptly he swung out of his seat. His elbow pinned the controls in place as he craned towards the window. "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon—get your heads over here, quick."

A murmur raced through the floor. The ship churned and slowed, a rusting shiver in the empty sky. Light as instinct, light as rain, caught in that stillness which must come before a dip—

Qival's hand snapped down, too late. His claws scathed over Keith's knuckles on the steering, not yet biting.

"Sorry. Old Earth tradition," Shiro said. He leaned over the chair as Qival bristled up and glowered at him. "We like to keep both hands on the wheel when someone's driving."

"Thanks," Qival ground out. His gaze lashed through Keith again, black and bright. "I had it."

"If you _had_ it, I wouldn't have gotten anywhere close to your console," said Keith, and let go.

A thought rippled through Qival, clear as a flight formation; but he jerked his chin. Following his signal, Shiro looked through the glass. Below them, the last sandy plains had sifted away to crags and cliffs. They glinted where the light caught them, violet and green and serpentine neons, gnashing up at the faraway shore with mossy fangs. But he kept looking—past the moulding peaks and stones, to the gleam winding down between the red-flecked cliffs. A seam like a vein through the world.

"There it is," said Qival. "Last natural water source on Vro-Seiira-Geo. Pretty, innit. Easiest landing spot left outside the capitol, if you wanna check it out."

The words seemed to go through him. Shiro swept through the dim charts drifting across Qival's screen. He found the world-map almost by reflex. Four continents stranded across the planet, and the pulse-point of Vro-Seiira's base beating on the grid, three hundred klicks away. "Don't you—your people _need_ it?" he said. He sounded very young. "Did someone else make it here first? What happened to the other factories?"

No answer came; but Qival's smile stole through the windshield, a sidelong, ironic curve. He hadn't looked at the map at all. "You've got a lot to learn about Vro-Seiira-Geo," he said.

  
  
  
  
  


They came back to the desert at dusk. Along the horizon, the two suns were spinning closer, closing in. The dunes stood quiet under their glossy light, haunted by the sidelong eclipse.

Keith helped him pull an old flyer out from the hangar. Together they headed across the sand. Meshed grates whined as they went by, sighing gouts of industrial fumes. Shiro steered them around glitters of dense, exposed wire, torn ration-stubs, the flavoured vervesticks that soldiers often chewed for energy. He glanced back, and caught his own thought reflected in Keith's eye: it wasn't just the Siuegir that the guards were watching.

Vro-Seiira's tower rose up at the outskirts of the paneled district, a skeletal silhouette. Its doors slid open to their shadows fell. 

No guards. Not one sound.

One after the other, they headed inside.

Past the threshold, each step struck like a shot. The tower was a vast, paneled hollow, where echoes went ringing almost past the limits of vision. He knew its design. At least a dozen of the commerce-heavy planets that he'd visited had them: cargo cannons with long-barreled bores, their walls corseted with steel beams, reeking of cartridge grease and dust. They drank fuel like fire, but they were an easy shortcut to quick-launch emergency shipments; each of the ones he'd seen could be compacted down to the size of a truck when it wasn't in use.

But no planet had built one to this scale.

Scaffolds hung from every level, shining like tree-boughs. Their suspension cables were strung with mine-lights and little signs. Five stories overhead, Shiro could just sift out the wink and sputter of old-fashioned lamps between the wires and firefly bulbs, a patchwork constellation.

"It's late for a visit."

At the far end of the cannon chamber, Vro-Seiira turned. Ten adjutants sprang up with her, outraged, claws and holoprints flurrying across the table. Her arm snapped out; they fell back in a wave. "Vro-Seiira-Geo recognises the attendance of the Black Paladin and Takashi Shirogane," said the prime minister. She twitched a finger. "Kneel."

Along the walls, twenty faceless soldiers clattered along the floor, bowing as one.

Keith folded his arms, watching. The hilt of his knife swayed against his back. "They don't need to do that."

Vro-Seiira leaned against her table. She looked rougher, more distracted, than she had by day. Her sleeves were rucked up past her square elbows; the bronze nails that she'd worn for turning pages glittered along her thick fingertips. "Their needs are nothing to you," she said, with a gaunt, tired swagger. "Speak. Were you not pleased with your trip?"

For a politician, Vro-Seiira beat around a subject like a spade. Shiro bit the inside of his cheek. "We had a good time with Qival," he said. "Thanks. would've been nice to see a few other people, though."

Vro-Seiira's heavy mouth creased; a fang rolled over her lip. "For what? Whatever questions you have, I can answer them."

"You didn't even give us your real name," said Keith.

Every head snapped towards him. Keith watched the prime minister, sweat gleaming through his hair and down the filigree line of his throat. "Qival called you _Kuzrel_."

"Did he."

"It slipped out while we were talking," Shiro said. An image hooked at the backs of his teeth: Qival's hands rolling in tides across the console, all his focus pinned to the heart of his ship. "He wasn't trying to give us state secrets. It sounded like he was used to saying it."

Vro-Seiira didn't unbend; but that was about what he might have expected. No leader could be easy to pacify; and she knew Qival too. Anyone who'd ever looked at that watchful poise would see the flaw in this excuse. 

When she spoke at last, it startled him. "When the war ended," said Vro-Seiira. Her voice had a husky clarity to it, like signal-smoke from a site stripped off the maps. "We gathered the survivors of all the factories. Together we promised that we would become a different people. It might have been something that we were only saying to each other. We said a stupid number of things. The name _Vro-Seiira-Geo_ was our first favour from the Empire. There were those who said that this could not continue. As long as we lived by the name we'd been given, we could never outgrow what had been made of us. There were also those who said: it must continue. That by leaving our name behind, we would be stripping ourselves of what little we had left."

Her nails tapped the table, a drumbeat, the jump of flint on steel.

"It happened at the time that I wanted a new name. So I asked my people to give me what they could not carry alone. They granted my wish. I will carry this title until my service ends. And then, perhaps, if the factory wills it, we will be ready for a different name." She tipped her head back, all arrogance crowned by firelight, her ministers drawn like steel around her. "Well? Does Vro-Seiira-Geo's story satisfy?"

The question was only half-meant for them. Her people were standing behind her, a coronet of watchful eyes. By their grace alone, she had taken her position. Five years in power wasn't a scepter or a public blessing; it wasn't the kaleidoscopic flare of a war-ship roaring awake to answer its chosen call. Vro-Seiira must know, as every performer and politician knew: she would only ever be worth as much as her next act.

"Sorry," Shiro said aloud. He stepped forward, and felt Keith yield to make space for him. Their bodies shifted around each other, hands like binary stars. "We didn't come here for an interrogation. But you're right—there might be some questions only you can answer for us."

"Like?" 

"Your workers are still underground," he said. "Aren't they. I'd appreciate the chance to look around the facility, if you'd let me."

This time, he hadn't caught her by surprise. But it was Keith she looked to, unexpectedly. Her face emptied, eyelids shuttering; her weight shifted as if before a cliff. Vro-Seiira rumbled something to him, edged with iron contempt. _Vrei tules_.

A hiss rose from the alcoves: one of the guards had cut off a yelp.

"Try that again," Keith said. He was staring with clear-eyed dislike. "I don't speak Galra."

Vro-Seiira slouched in place, as if slackening beneath a blow. Someone, Shiro thought, had been telling her stories from beyond Veniwar's stars. But she only said, "I suppose it's irrelevant. Vro-Seiira-Geo is aware of our position. Everything we have is yours to take. The factory will be opened for your inspection in four days."

"Four?"

"Four," Vro-Seiira echoed; but she relented. "The delay is something we must enforce."

"If you want to shut us out, just do it," Keith said. "Giving us half the information we need's a waste of time."

For a moment, Shiro thought that this might have been too far; but Keith had a gift for dangerous manoeuvres. Vro-Seiira cradled her fingers, then began to strip off each hard, gilded nail. Gold struck across the table in chimes. "Half a turn ago, the Siuegir came to us for refuge. In return, they offered certain rewards. Seed stock. Air filters. All the metal that we could salvage from their ship. A proprietary technique for using," her lip curled, savouring the translation, " _shit_ to improve crop production. They had a good amount of it aboard their ship, they said. Well, I believed that much. So Vro-Seiira-Geo accepted the shipment on one condition: that its use could be proven safe for the planet. The tests continued until a few weeks ago."

"When someone stole it," Shiro said.

Vro-Seiira's lashes swept low. She spared him a cut of a nod. "We're securing all routes away from the breached site. Four days more, and the search will be complete."

"It doesn't have to be that long. We can help you look."

"Under whose authority?" Vro-Seiira twitched a sleeve. The gesture seemed to ring out. Three adjutants marched to the table, and began to tidy its work away: blueprints, sedimentary charts, figurines set on streets sketched narrow. "Does a citizen of Earth consent to Vro-Seiira-Geo's jurisdiction in this matter?" 

Keith stared; his brows twisted black. "Shiro already told you—we're not here for Earth. You're not responsible for us. Whatever's happening, we just want to _help_."

"I see. If you die here on my floor, Earth will not demand justice from us. If I allow you to serve with my guards, and you defy an order that costs my factory a life, the Coalition will not rush in to mediate the conflicts between your governing laws and mine."

"I can take an order," Keith bit out.

"Yes," said Vro-Seiira. "I can see your obedience from here." She held up a hand, studying it. A ray of lamplight spilled over her skin, the bruisy rings where the bronze had cinched tight. "Consider this the price of admission. You will have complete freedom in my factory. Act however and wherever you choose. No oversight. In return, admit this much: when you speak, the voice that rises from you is more than yours alone. The only question's whether you are willing to be responsible for the way you use your words."

If she'd meant to put Keith at ease, it didn't work. He could still feel Keith fuming: mouth bitten tight, spine prickling like a live current. Shiro stepped forward. Their arms brushed, soundless and fleeting. He felt Keith stiffen before his shoulder crushed against Shiro's—side against side, leaning against him with a fierce and absolute trust that Shiro could hold him steady. The impact lit him up; it warmed him through, veins and ribs and fingertips. He could have followed the light of it all the way across a wasteland.

He looked back to Vro-Seiira. "You've given us a lot to think about," Shiro said, clear above the mute, mirroring faces of her cabinet. "Thanks for telling us."

  
  
  
  
  


Outside the tower, the skies had blistered to gold. From the doors of the cannon chamber, he could see the guest quarters, a silhouette cut sharp as a beacon. But the same restless thought seemed to have struck them both. Shiro turned away and Keith fell into step beside him, following the long edge of a panel by foot.

They were half a mile out by the time Keith broke. "What's she _thinking?_ "

A laugh rasped in his throat. "She doesn't want the Coalition on her planet," Shiro said. "It happens."

"You think she's hurting them?"

"Her citizens? It's possible. But I'd be surprised if she was." It was a good guess, if you believed in what the Coalition stood for; not everyone could. Her voice drifted back through him, silver-spun and surrenderless: _I asked my people to give me what they could not carry alone._ He rubbed a knuckle over his brow, swiping sweat from the roots of his hair. "I guess now we know why Aaklir wanted to bring that shipment here."

The standard terraforming shipment wasn't a cure-all. It couldn't unravel mould from a crop, or coax lilies out of a dead land. But given water, time, and the right patch of soil, a single shipment had been known to keep a city fed for months.

"Right," Keith said. His voice sank, the way it did when he was working through a thought. "We know Vro-Seiira-Geo was one of the Galra's biggest equipment suppliers. They were probably locked in as a factory-planet for centuries. And it looks like the Galra stayed pretty careful about making sure that they wouldn't have any way to grow their own food. There's no way they have more than basic hydroponics down there."

"They must be eating something. Are they trading?"

But that didn't fit. The Daq had settled on the planet before the beginning of the war. Aaklir and xir friends had needed to force their way through the system-shields to land in safety. Vro-Seiira-Geo offered no shelter except what its prime minister could provide; their morning flight had proven that. Every inch of earth that they'd seen said that this was a planet with no goods to trade, and no will to try.

Keith glanced up as they steered around a corner. His steps sharpened to a hunting rhythm. "The Galra had a policy for some of the loyal planets," he said. "They'd let some of the bigger manufacturers stock up to ten years of rations if they were in an active warzone. That way, the factories wouldn't try to take in extra people, and the Galra could skip them on the supply chain for a couple years if they had to."

"Nice of them."

"Why stick to starving your enemies when you can starve everyone, right?"

They walked on. Tower after tower came fading in through the waxy dusk. A salt-wind whistled through the the spires. There was the provisional tower, the communications tower gone weathered and grey, the quarters for guards and guests, where the Siuegir were kept. The patrol'd passed by less than an hour ago; their bootprints were stamped across the paths like brocade. "Let's say they stocked up here," Shiro said; it was easier than thinking of the alternative. "It's been around six or seven years since Vro-Seiira closed the system. Unless we've missed something, it'll take another couple years before they run low."

"We're not missing anything," said Keith. "Aaklir called us for a reason."

His voice carried across the dunes and stones, bright as a flame on its match. He was the only sure light for miles.

"All right," Shiro said, softer. "That gets us to the next question. So far, we haven't heard about anyone trying to leave this planet. So who'd stand to gain from starving out the survivors?"

"Someone really stupid."

"Thanks," said Shiro, after a moment. "That's helpful, Keith."

"None of it makes sense," Keith said. "We had to get loading tech to move that shipment onto Aaklir's ship. How'd _anyone_ steal it down here?"

Shiro turned the imagined scene over in his head: a terraforming shipment standing alone in a white room, delicate and vast as a starship in its own right, a knot of chemicals and pseudomonads and unpronounceable lichens, dreaming of a green new world. On Earth, and in space, it would've been easy. The Garrison had laid a maglev line from the engineering facility to the launch-pad to carry shipments; the Atlas could manipulate its artificial gravity fields to shunt a shipment from room to room. Each kit took two years to assemble; no one had ever tried to move a terraforming kit with less than a full ship's controls.

But that was the problem with imagining. "We're overthinking this," Shiro said. "If we want a real answer, we'll probably need to take a look at the factory."

"You told Vro-Seiira we weren't getting involved."

"I didn't say that," said Shiro, with a diplomatic definition of _involved_ pinned under his tongue. He sighed. "But there's something else happening here. She didn't have to tell us about the theft. She's been telling us more than we needed to know from the beginning." 

They were coming to the outskirts of the base. Along the edges of the stamped sand, an evening breeze was unearthing the rubble of older buildings. Splinters and scraps, hills that rose at a roof's slope. Steel rebars jutted through the sand in pale thorns; but a gust spun across the lot and they were gone again, all of their secrets swept into the dark.

"We know that the shipment probably wasn't destroyed by accident," Shiro said. He was speaking the way Keith did, now: setting each fact before them like a stone—seeing the weight that he had carried but not known take shape before him. "So the odds are pretty good that someone took the shipment to defy Vro-Seiira. To make her do something that she wasn't doing before."

Keith's gaze flashed over him. "You think they're going to try again," he said.

"Well, it's an idea," Shiro said. "Not that I'm a detective."

They turned the last corner. A patrol shelter stood at the end of the path, wind-beaten and crusted with salt. Keith gripped his elbow. "Wait," he said. "Look."

They'd caught up with the patrol. A unit of six stood in trim formation on a small platform: chins lifted, a whip-hilt studding each hip. The seventh had crouched by the panel's edge, and was ticking and tweaking at some device. The platform clanked. A metallic creak churned the sand. The soldier sprang up. They darted up as their unit started the grinding descent into the earth.

The panel had barely sealed when Keith raced out. 

"Keith!"

By the time Shiro caught up, Keith had pitched to his knees. He swiped the sand-scrubbed screen, squinting. "U-0-h," he said. "F-S-V-R-I. No biometric scans. That's it."

Shiro stared at him—quick hands, dust on his shoulders, reckless with radiance. "U-0-h-F-S-V-R-I," he said. "All right—let's head back. If we're going down there, we're going need a cover story to keep Vro-Seiira happy."

"Who said we need a cover story?" said Keith.

The inflection went through him, stainless to the gut. His fists shuddered. "We can't provoke her, Keith."

"I know. And I'm saying—you don't need a cover story for both of us."

"Keith—" But the rest unraveled. He couldn't think. "You brought me here to work with you."

"You _are_ working with me," Keith said. "This is a scouting mission. It doesn't need both of us. Not until we know that there's something to find."

An answer flared through him; but Shiro knew better than to say the first things that came to mind. He shifted his weight, heel to heel, watching sand clump and scatter across the metal. There was a reason that Keith had taken him for this mission. Not Krolia, not Hunk, but the highest-ranking diplomatic envoy that he could call a friend. "I guess that makes sense," he said at last. His mouth skewed. "Scouting probably works better for people whose arms don't light up."

Keith stiffened. He caught Shiro's wrist before he could flinch. "I—" he said. In the moment he might have been eighteen again: jaw drawn, flushed with the effort of finding the right words. "Next time," he said, a dark-eyed absolute. "We'll go together. Both of us."

It said something about Keith that nothing he said ever seemed like a promise, only prophecy. Shiro felt his eyes lidding, helpless. At thirty-two, he was too old to be coddled—he'd been too old in the cradle. Still his hand came up; his thumb grazed Keith's knuckles in the only answer they needed. "Any rescue signals?" he said.

"No. Just give me two days." An idea lit him. "But you could talk to Aaklir while you're up here."

"Recon," said Shiro.

"Yeah. Get xir away from Vro-Seiira. Xe might tell you more when she isn't around."

He was listening, or he meant to. _Next time_. The promise was tolling in him still, warm as a faraway bell. "You've really changed, Keith."

That stopped him. Keith frowned. "Too much?"

He understood the question—felt the phantom ache in it. Gone were the years when they'd been boys crowned with silt and sunshine, laughing as they raced through the canyons. Things had changed; but he couldn't pin the difference down, no matter how he looked. Keith was still steady, armed with his snap-judgment strategies, his blade-sharp obsession with getting things right. How his voice had hitched in the Red Lion's cockpit once, fists bristling over her controls. The turn and flush of him under a desert sunset, all rumpled hair and a mouth painted in light. There was nothing about Keith now that hadn't been in him all along.

"No," Shiro said. "Not too much."

They rose. Side by side, their steps fell together, winding through the evening's blooming shadows and back to the guest tower.

"While we're planning things out," Shiro said, "try not to get into too much trouble without me while you're down there. After all—" he smiled, with a curl of gravity. "We're supposed to be on vacation."

  
  
  
  
  



	3. Chapter 3

  
  
  
  
  


The Siuegir, Shiro learned, were staying in an older tower. Its door-sensors were sand-scratched, numb with the years. The service elevator's buttons unstuck themselves as soon as he looked away. Even the walls seemed to wither as he went by: pockmarks shivering in the paint, rust flicking little green tongues along the old-fashioned sills. But he could hear steelwork at the end of the hall, shrill and gleaming, and the misty echoes of a great cloud of voices.

Shiro went on. 

The echoes drew him out to an open loft, a maze of rope drawn across a strange, shining floor. He stopped in the archway, bemused. Ropes crossed and webbed every inch of open air; they scrawled across the floor like calligraphy written in twine and nylon lines. Heavy coils drooped from the ceiling beams, limned like fire. There seemed to be no way forward—but as he watched, a flock of shadows sprang across the ropes. Each landing thudded through the tower, deep as heartstrings. One by one, they darted along the beams and went racing into the upper reaches of the loft, shrieking and laughing.

Kids. Siuegir kids.

"Intruder!"

Shiro tensed. Another kid crouched on the tightrope above the doors. They peered down at him, bird-eyed, then went skipping across the drooping nets. "Intruder!" they bawled. "Hey, it's an intruder, it's real, it's big! Come quick!"

At once they were pelted with a flurry of holoprint scraps. "We are _working_ , eh!" an engineer called, above a rush of welding sparks. "Little strelcrow, pipe down! Nobody needs your mealy-mouthed jokes right now!"

"Strelcrow yourself! See who rescues you when this dumb fire-trap lights up! Bet you won't even get yourself loose from your dumb net!"

"Ah? Is this how you got taught to talk to your elders? You keep it up, you won't be Veldu _lir_ for much longer—"

"Says you," Veldulir shouted back, wriggling their long tongue like a rude wet banner. " _Mnnn_ , fancy being jealous 'cos you've never been _ir_ to anybody!"

They shrieked, a delighted war-cry, as the engineer set down their torch and pounced, rolling them across the ropes.

"Eh!" Another voice, more familiar, rose through the chaos. "Is it—Takashirogane?"

Shiro turned. Aaklir was weaving through the maze, hooking and hopping over each tangling line. "Shiro's fine," he said. "Hope I'm not catching you in the middle of anything."

"A creator who cannot take a break does not know how to work," said Aaklir, all cheer. "Have you come on your own today, Shiro?"

He caught the inflection. "Not technically alone," said Shiro. "It's like we told Vro-Seiira—this wasn't supposed to be a formal visit to the planet. But I'm at loose ends right now, and I figured—well, I've been on this planet for long enough without meeting the reason that Keith and I came out here."

It wasn't the clearest line that he could have taken to an introduction; but it seemed like a safe bet that Vro-Seiira-Geo didn't have the resources to burn on surveillance. The Siuegir would know it, too. Aaklir drummed xir fingertips together in a quick trill. "Is that so?" xe said. "That's all right, then—I forgive you for coming late. You know that both of you welcome here, always."

 _Both of you_. 

Shiro cracked a rueful smile.

He followed xir through the ropes. The floor rang with their steps, murmuring like drumbeats. Step by step, the bones of the room came clear. Every tower in Vro-Seiira's desert had been built for a reason; even blind, even dreaming, he would have known what this room had been. The air prickling with the faint, metallic scent of old fuel cells. The walls glittering, pocked with nail-marks and bruisy stripes where the old pipes had been prised away. Vro-Seiira had turned her armoury over to the Siuegir, and they'd remade it. A crystalline sweetness bloomed from hanging satchets. Holoprints fluttered along the walls; they swayed from the lines like talismans, visions of warp-gates and particle barriers turned lush by the morning. 

"Here we are!" Aaklir said. 

They had come to a loose clearing, where the ropes gave way to light. Higher in the rafters, the lines spooled into hammocks. A scattering of half-fixed artifacts stood below them: screens and beacon capsules, ancient carburetors rusted into coral colours. Aaklir waved at one of these—a knob-kneed carving, teetering before a fold of faceted screens. "Humans like chairs, I remember." With less confidence, this might have been a question. "Sit! Make yourself steady. Then you and I can talk. I have been working on a new design, you see, it's good to have fresh input on such a thing—"

"Aaklir."

A long silvery foot drooped from the hammock above them. Aaklir glanced up. Its toes pricked xir in the nose. "Clumsy," said the foot's owner, and withdrew while Aaklir hopped and swiped at the empty air.

" _Shakva_ ," said Aaklir, nearly howling. "What are you doing!"

"My duty, as always," Shakva said. The netting creaked; its blankets furled and murmured. "Did you kidnap the representative of Earth because you couldn't be bothered to build an AI for product review."

"Your voice is always so bleak when you talk about good ideas," Aaklir muttered. Xe collapsed to the floor, feeling along the frame of a vast holoscreen. "Tsah—Shakva, look, we finished a download! You can start reading a new shipment of those wretched horrorlogs you like—"

Shakva bowed out from its hammock. Its wrist flashed pewter in the thin light; Shiro remembered the arc of it from the desert: the steel-skinned handler who'd twisted Aaklir into obedience by the ear. "I can do both," said Shakva, resting by Aaklir's shoulder.

Aaklir grumbled, creaky as rust. Xe caught Shakva's fingers and drew them across the screen. It was clear that this was a ritual. They trailed down through the catalog. Aaklir skipped some, but guided others into the wires of the hard drive, taking xir cues in a language that Shiro couldn't begin to translate. There was no clear theme in the logs they chose: a cover splashed with chrome letters and a jaunty straw hat; another gaudy cover that was all petals and leather straps and heaving, pixellated flesh—

"Hold on," Shiro said. "Are _those_ horrorlogs?"

Shakva lifted a brow. Pixels fumed through the whites of its downloading eyes. "Yes," it said.

"Right," Shiro said, after a moment. He could have thought before he'd spoken, and hadn't. That was on him. "I guess horror's a pretty different genre for humans."

"Is it. But what is more horrifying than a story about consumption? A bond whose end is the act of feeding yourself to another being. Rewiring your understanding of the universe for their comfort. Eroding the chemical habits of your body, serotonin and oxytocin, until you cannot feel satisfaction without them, knowing that that their presence in your life is temporary and outside your control."

"I," Shiro said. There was a tone to Shakva's voice that he could not read, sweetly metallic. "That's one way to look at it."

"I do prefer 'inexorable infrasocial parasitism narrative' as a category descriptor," said Shakva. "But I am told that it is difficult to pronounce."

The screen flashed; the download had finished. Shakva's head swiveled, tracing some inhuman signal. Ignoring Shiro's glassy stare, it coiled back into the hammocks. Cool chirring sounds drifted down like snow.

"Do not bother with Shakva." Aaklir sniffed, tweaking xir nose. "Data-augs, they are _all_ such terrible saps. You should see how it gets with an opera. Glitched-up. Oily. Hiding under blankets. Like a giant steel tissue."

Shiro breathed into a slow laugh. "Sounds like you've known each other for a while."

"Eh, it takes only a centiday to know Shavka, really," said Aaklir. Xir jaw sharpened with a new thought. "But—ah? Has the story of Siuegir stretched out to the Earth after all?"

_Tsah, tsah, Champion._

The faces weren't the same, but their voices rang down to his bones in notes like steel, cement, bitter iron. The scything walls of an arena. An alien ruff bridling at the edge of his vision; a gnarled hand on his forehead, thick as clay. _Don't be sick, eh. They will soon come to wake us for the next match. If it is not you—but it must be you. You must be ready. Listen to me, Champion—_

He might have dreamt it. In his dreams, the arena was still vast enough to cage galaxies; every knife was a shell for a familiar face. It wouldn't be the first time that memory led him astray—blurred the line between ghost and nightmare. He knew better than to think it mattered now.

"Honestly," Shiro said aloud, "for the last year, I've had my hands pretty full keeping up with every planet that gets admitted to the Coalition. But from what I know, Sieugir hasn't joined us yet."

Aaklir arched in place. Xir tongue flicked against xir teeth, a thoughtless twitch. "That is their business, I suppose," xe said. "Choosing alliances is a tricky thing."

"It shouldn't be."

"What a judgment, eh," said Aaklir, looking pleased. "And when are you going to make that judgment to Vro-Seiira's face?"

The conversation had shifted around him again. He had the sense of a secret caught at the limits of his hearing, the heartbeat of a planet peeled thin as frost. "Should I?"

"You must, if you are going to recruit this planet into the Coalition. Vro-Seiira-Geo does not move so easily." Aaklir cocked xir head. Xir dark hair prickled in foxtail clusters. "But perhaps you do not know the stories."

He was being led. That much he could have expected, though he hadn't wanted to; Keith didn't get involved with people who couldn't fend for themselves. But it took a particular kind of mind to stake your future on an ally you'd just met, a day after their landing. "You could tell me the stories," said Shiro.

"Tsih," said Aaklir. Xe hefted xirself onto the holoscreen. Xir toes tapped along the glass, slight as rain. "Well, since you have asked nicely."

The current Vro-Seiira had been born the daughter of the main factory's convoy supervisor. At the end of the war, she'd been as close as the planet would come to an heir; but _close_ hadn't been good enough. She'd ordered that the planet's shields be raised as a political gesture: a banner of defiance to rally her followers as every factory on the planet looked on, charring, waiting. In the first year after the planet went dark, Vro-Seiira turned to lawmaking. She poured months into the project of selecting the eleven members of her governing cabinet, signing over control of factory stages to each of them, staging their ceremonies like coronations. The vote of six ministers could strip the marrows from her bones. This, said Vro-Seiira, was as it should be: the scepter and the flame in balance.

As a show of faith, Vro-Seiira had called them together for their first decision. Each of the ministers had been chosen according to transparent processes and laws; but no legal authority had chosen her. They had cast off the chains of tyranny and power without reason. No authority on Vro-Seiira-Geo could not be permitted to exist outside the control of its ministry. Kneeling, she'd asked her cabinet for recognition: to be known and held up as the prime minister of Vro-Seiira-Geo.

Her chosen ministers ratified the proposal at a vote of six to five.

"Politicians," Aaklir said. Xir smile struck like a solar flare. "Of course they didn't trust her. They had just come out of a regime where you could be shot for putting the wrong colour of shielding on a warship. She could have told them that she would rule as Zarkon's planetary regent until the war was over, then dismantled the system from inside. But instead—this!"

There was no poison in Aaklir's rollicking laughter or the simmer of xir heels against the screen--but something lay beneath it all the same, nameless and heavy. Shiro leaned back in his chair. "Which way did Vro-Seiira vote when the Siuegir asked if they could land here?"

Aaklir's laughter dropped. Xir shoulders prickled.

"Vro-Seiira voted in our favour," Shakva said above them. Glancing up, Shiro caught its metal eye, poking through the hammock on a red-wired stalk. "Aaklir has a fetish for convenience, that's all. It is easier to bribe a corrupt official than to appeal to one who has an image to preserve."

"Ah!" The last of Aaklir's feathery merriment collapsed into a scowl. Xe tugged at the loops of xir own hair, a rueful straightening. "Don't listen to Shakva, I told you. We have no choice but to be practical here. As soon as you build a new system of rules, you have made two enemies. One is the people who want to have the old system back. The other is the people who think that they could build better rules than you. Am I wrong?"

"I think," Shiro said, after a moment, "that's some heavy political theory. On Earth, people have been arguing about this stuff for thousands of years."

"Yes, yes, people," said Aaklir. "But none of them were _me_."

Xir mouth was curling; xir whole body lit with focus, a star in a teeming crowd. But Shiro'd served with pilots and mathematicians for long enough to learn their varied dialects of pride. "Do you want to argue about politics," he said, "or do you want me to hang out here while you get some actual work done?"

Aaklir's brows drifted up. "Tsah, you are thoughtful!" xe said, as if surprised. "But I am not so busy that I would neglect to entertain my guest."

"I came to see how you were doing. Remember? Besides," said Shiro, "you tell a good story. Just that would've been worth the trip."

Aaklir flushed. A preen rilled through xir spine. Xe hopped down, crouching to sift through a toolbox. It was easy to see why Keith liked xir—transparent and unchancy, but bright as a knife. "I would not mind telling you more. But you must tell me what stories you like."

"Well," said Shiro; but there was only one story he could've asked for. "How'd you meet Keith?"

"Ah," said Aaklir. "Yes, that is a good one. Come over here—you can hold the wires while I spool."

_Here_ was a nest of pistons and inlet connectors, shining around a half-finished engine. Aaklir guided him down, fussy and focused. Xe pressed Shiro's hands around a valve, pinned his thumb like an anchor against the wafer-thin glass of an old interface, talking all the while at a cheerful, lilting clip.

Xe'd been six months into a complicated exile when Keith had found xir fleet. The worst of the complications was the resettling. By nature, the Siuegir were advanced enough to adapt to any climate and gravity; by habit, they preferred to avoid it. Out of desperation, they'd scorched through the last of their fuel to get to the most promising world on their maps: a planet whose continents were still in drift, all glassy sands and raw black earth. Its last settlers objected. Their disagreements escalated.

The Blade of Marmora had come at the bloodiest heights of their conflict. At first the Siuegir had taken them for raiders. ( _"Will you tell me that he doesn't look like one? A crew of five, dressed in secondhand armour, with that vratty anonymous ship!"_ ) But the mistake had made no difference to Keith. Two weeks after the Blades found them, Keith had come to make his offer: the Siuegir could stay, clinging to their new war, and wait for the Coalition to judge their case. Or they could take the Blades' fuel, and their terraforming shipment, and go to any new system they chose.

"For the longest time, I did not understand him," Aaklir said. "Good fuel was not cheap. That alone he could have sold to certain planets in the next three star-systems, and made enough profit to buy a new fleet. Our battles had nothing to do with him; he could have left us to be judged as invaders and thieves."

Xe unraveled a circlet-like part from the caging engine. Sparks rattled across the loop, a radiant frost. 

"But that," xe said, "would not have been the right thing to do."

"You make him sound like a hero."

"He _is_ a hero." Aaklir craned over the engine. Xir ruff bloomed out; xir voice rang on every starry syllable, sure as a child reciting a myth. "Black Paladin, defender of all universes. They say that even Zarkon could not force him to bow. It was Keith who taught me this—you cannot compromise what you know is right."

Shiro closed his eyes. In the dark, he could see Keith in silhouette: sunset pouring over him like a victor's cloak, reeking of salt and desert smoke. The last Black Paladin, defender of all universes—but still human, unfaltering, brimming with his own impossible light.

"Yeah," he said. "I guess that's true."

  
  
  
  
  


For the next day, Shiro rose and slept in a restless haze.

The towers had been cannons before they'd been converted to residential quarters. They'd never been meant as shields against a desert summer. At noon, with two suns jewelling the crown of the sky, the guest rooms flushed with a heat that was almost volcanic. Shiro stripped down to his thinnest flannels, and lay dry-eyed and baking in the sheets. He flicked his well-wishes through the holocomm to Vro-Seiira and Qival—asked for access to the local databanks and got them. Late in the evening, he called Curtis and listened to his solemn delivery of the Atlas's canteen gossip, the litany of transferred postings in and out of the ship, its daily incident logs. Listened to the ambient noise of his ship from light-years away, blips and scattered mechanical glitches singing through the transmission like a lullaby. When he dreamt, it was only the same wasteland dream that had trailed him through the years: steel, blackness, and empty stars.

_Two days_ , Keith had said. He knew better than to doubt it. 

Later he would surprise himself with how much he remembered from his second day alone. Sunlight had charred the hours down to shapeless smoke. Every breath ached, salt by the lungful. He read, and the letters sifted through him as if through sand. Evening swelled, gold and bruising. The datapad lit with the thrumming screen of a long-distance call. In the glassy simmer of sunset, he felt its silicon twitch, felt Curtis's voice seeping through him like ink— 

And the hard thump of a body outside his window. 

Every nerve flared. Shiro twisted up, bracing back against the wall. He peered out. From the ledge, Keith stared back, armour torn, battered in grime and crystallised salt. 

" _Takashi,_ " said the ship's static. " _What's going on? Did something happen?_ " 

"I'll call you back," Shiro said. The datapad fell. His fingers were fumbling, grinding over the ancient latch. Rust shrilled loose. The window craned open and Keith came tumbling into his bed. Sand and exhaust howled and scattered over them. Shiro clapped the window shut. " _Keith._ Are you all right?" 

His fingers had splayed against Keith's back, bracing him up. "Forgot which window was my room," Keith said. A shiver stuttered through him like a little flame. "Sorry." 

"Hey. You don't hear me complaining." Outside, far below, thin voices wove and scattered through the salt winds. "Sounds like you made it back just in time." 

"They weren't that close, Shiro," Keith said; but his breath hitched as Shiro's hand slid over his spine. "I think—they thought I was just an animal. Something that got underground by accident." 

Sunset had doused the room. The walls of the tower glowed through his lashes like raw glass; there was nothing between them but the rasping arid taste of the desert. "I can see why," Shiro said. Two days in some mapless undercity, and still Keith had come back—through the bleaching heat, climbing the tower as if it were no more than a ship. "All right. I'm guessing they won't check up here for now. Come on." 

"Where—" 

"Just the shower," Shiro said. His heel caught the floor; but he waited until Keith had sunk against him before he began to pull them up. "You feel like you could use the cooldown." 

He guided Keith towards the bathroom. The weight of him crackled like a firebrand, all charcoal and reeking heat. "Wait," Keith said at the door. He raked at his suit, tracing down its folds and lining. A slim pen's-weight pressed into Shiro's hand. 

"Didn't want you to think I came back empty-handed," Keith said, and staggered inside.

Shiro was still standing before the door when the pressuriser began to churn. The bitdrive nestled against his palm, dented steel, warm with the echoes of a heartbeat. It'd been one of Pidge's projects from years ago: a storage drive that could brute-force and back up files from any system, no matter its programming language, its security, or its operating structure. She'd delivered it with an ironic pleasure: _not that it's actually good for saving lives—but technically neither are we now, right?_

His grip flexed. Shiro went to pick up his datapad.

The bitdrive was still sequencing when the bathroom door clanked open. A cooling mist came drifting out through the shadows. The holos gnashed into a blur of faceted pixels.

"Did you find anything?"

From the bed, Shiro looked up. His voice guttered out of his throat.

Keith had dressed in his uniform again, but only halfway. Dusk rolled across his skin, honeyed and warm; it striped the damp swing of his hair, made stars out of the drops beading down his chest. Even half-dressed, he moved with a kind of private gravity, light and time bending around the lean grace of him.

"Not," said Shiro. There was more to say; but the words were floating somewhere at the back of his head. "Uh. The."

"Shiro?"

He jerked. He'd been too slow at the window earlier; the room was pulsing around him like fever. "It doesn't look like the data's corrupted," Shiro said, tugging at his shirt. "But the system it runs on's pretty different from ours. Pidge's software's been trying to decode it for around fifteen minutes. Do you have any decryption software on your ship?"

"Some," Keith said. His voice carried with knifing clarity. "Probably not as good as Atlas tech. But we should make sure whatever's on that drive won't knock out the ship systems before we try it."

"What _is_ on here?"

"I'm not sure," Keith said, settling against the bedframe. His mouth quirked; the light of his smile cut through the shadows. "Found out they were keeping the shipment in cargo. So I grabbed all the datalogs for the week when the shipment disappeared. Cargo facilities used to have to keep really good records when they had to report to the Galra. No matter what else's on there, it has to tell us where the shipment went."

Shiro flicked the bitdrive; it whirred against his steel fingertips in echoes, echoes. "Well, now we've got our lead," he said, and rose. "Did you see anything outside the facility?"

"The whole factory's shut down," Keith said as Shiro headed for his luggage. "It's big. Most of it looks like a regular city now—just underground, and crowded. They were moving a lot of people around while I was down there. I think half the city's living in one or two sectors."

"'They'," said Shiro. It was an inflection he knew. "Guards or soldiers?"

Keith stopped. "Soldiers," he said. His brows ticked. "They didn't look like Qival. But they had his uniform."

Qival, watchful and laughing, who'd flown them out to the edge of the world just to see what answers they'd give him. _Us Daq, we came from all over the galaxies to be Vro-Seiira-Geo's blade. And we gave 'em everything she asked for._

"Right." Shiro plunged into his suitcase. He'd packed for what he'd thought to be every possibility—a reckless mix of officer's jackets, traveling gear, and jeans. In two days, he'd torn through most of his summer clothes. There were two short-sleeved shirts left at the bottom of the pack. He snapped one to Keith, who caught it and stared.

"You know I've got my own stuff, right?"

Shiro pulled off his own shirt in a single reckless drag. The new shirt clung to his skin with cool, silky longing as he drew it on, every inch of it a distraction and a relief. "I'd rather give those guys another hour before we start moving around again. He tweaked his collar, then the hem; his brows bent in an act of absolute focus. "Didn't want you to catch a cold in the meantime."

"It's summer, Shiro."

A button creaked, slipping through his fingers. He pinched tighter, and it sprayed loose, jouncing and rolling away. His heart pounded in his ears. "Just," Shiro breathed, "keep talking, Keith."

"I'm done for now. That was everything I found down there." Footsteps scuffed across the floor. Keith's shadow flowed over him in an easy wave. "Do you ... want help with that?"

He glanced up. The shirt wasn't a neat fit; it draped over Keith's shoulders in loose, rumpled folds, swaying open around his waist. In the half-light, he could see the stretch of lean muscle, the point of a hipbone through the sheer cloth. "With," Shiro echoed, then understood. "Oh, right."

"Yeah," Keith said. Again came that glinting, unsteady smile. "Wouldn't want you to catch a cold either."

Something rasped in his throat—but he was too tired to feel out all the weight and edges of what he meant to say. Shiro swallowed, and turned. "I guess the Atlas spoiled me more than I realised," he said. "Thanks."

Keith buttoned him up, neat and wordless, as evening faded into the room. It was strange to feel him this close, dark-eyed and stripped out of his armour, heat in every breath between them. Closer than they'd been in days.

His pulse had steadied, but he couldn't seem to lift his hands.

"So," Keith said. His hands drifted over Shiro's chest, unseeing. "Where do we go from here?"

Shiro focused.

If there was any trail to be traced out from the bitdrive, it was fading by the hour. They couldn't risk the ship, or descend into the factory together. The Atlas wouldn't hold a secure transmission at this distance. Aaklir might be willing to help; but they couldn't go digging for state secrets and expect Vro-Seiira to keep her grudges clear once the story came to light.

There was no one else they could ask for help.

His gaze drifted past the bed, the sleek paneled glass, to the towers. Here and there, he could still see a lure of brittle fire along their bladed lines, their windows like lonely stars scattered through the dark.

He caught Keith's fingers as they grazed the last button.

"I've got one idea," Shiro said.

  
  
  
  
  


Night had cast a pall over the desert. They crossed the dunes in silence, all of their footsteps and whispers swallowed into the dust. The communications tower rose out of the emptiness: a column of ivory flame, antennae prickling from its stones in a coat of spectral spines.

They circled the tower, watching for the tell-tale lights of the evening patrol. "Are you ready?" said Keith. 

Shiro glanced over. A smile brimmed at the corners of his mouth. "What kind of question's that?"

"The kind I'm asking," said Keith. "I know it's been a while since you were out in the field."

Coming from anyone else, this might have been taken for concern. But there was a certain slant to Keith's gaze, a curve in his voice that couldn't be misread. Shiro cocked a brow. "This isn't a competition, Keith," he said. His stride shifted, pushing him a few steps ahead. Keith scoffed, and Shiro smiled. "All right—our mission's to get inside and make it out again without being detected. How long do we have?"

"About an hour. We probably need twenty minutes to get up to the right floor. Fifteen to get the data processed. If we miss the window, we'll be stuck inside for another hour while we wait for the patrols to get out of sight."

The tower lights hadn't faltered since they'd set out. Only the antennae stirred, flickering chains of status and signal lights. "It doesn't look like there's any security inside."

"No," Keith said, thin as echoing. "It's been a long time since they had to talk to anyone outside the system."

Together, they began to climb.

The communications tower had been built to survive. The antennae prickled and glinted; their wires stretched around him, dense as jungle-brush, as he pulled himself up. At the very fringes of his vision, Keith was already meters up—swaying from wire to spindling wire with a seething grace, as if each handhold had been grown for his grip. 

_Twenty minutes_ , he'd said, to scale a tower that tore at the sky like a fang. It was easy, now, to see how he'd gotten to that count.

Vro-Seiira's gravity was lighter but not much kinder. They were halfway up the tower when the ache caught up to him. His breath hitched. Airless lights spun through the backs of his eyes; a molten ache gathered in his shoulders, trickling thickly down. Shiro ignored it, and kept climbing. Elsewhere, just out of sight, Keith was panting. The sound spilled down the wall in little shocks of heat. He knew the curve of Keith's grip—how it'd cling to stone, rough, sure, possessive. The thought tugged heat through his marrows; his whole body pounded with it, oversaturated—

Shiro fumbled. A beam grunted as his grip clenched, skin and steel clinging tight. He jolted, swaying. He watched as moonlight came drifting along the tower. White swept through the antennae like fire into a field—and, gleaming high at the brink of his vision, a line of metal jutting like a cliff.

His hands clenched; his boots sparked off the wall. Shiro went skidding to the edge of the antenna. He swung, and swung, and jumped.

The world arced around him, a wheel of stone and hollow singing constellations.

His hand struck the windowsill. Metal shrilled, sparks flurried out like dust, and then Shiro was twisting, scrambling, hauling himself onto the ledge. He landed with a shock. His head struck glass. Stars spasmed across his nerves, and his ears surged with a giddy roar.

But Shiro caught his breath, and leaned over the ledge. "Need a hand?" he said.

Startled, half a level below, Keith glared. "How'd you—"

"Always thought they shouldn't have retired the gymnastics course for cadets at the Garrison," Shiro said. Keith had flushed with the climb, glossed with sweat from his jaw to his fingertips. Muscle shifted beneath his clinging suit, all hard, thwarted adrenaline.

Shiro swallowed, tasting sand and filmy salt. "Come on," he said, and reached out. "We should get going."

Keith clasped his hand tight.

  
  
  
  
  


The windows were ancient glass, greened and warped over centuries; the third lock gave way with barely a flinch. One after another, they slipped inside.

The communications tower too had been re-forged from an old cannon. In the control center, he could see the bones of Vro-Seiira's war-room, or the loft that they'd given to the Siuegir—cheap iron bars overlaid with a chemical silence. Workstations nested along the walls, monitors flush alongside gaping data-sockets, each as wide as a fist.

He hadn't spent much time in rooms like these, but he knew what to look for. Shiro crossed the floor. The first screen lit under his touch; its cursor tapped out a mute and gentle riddle. "Any ideas how we get past the lockscreen?" he said. "Or are we doing things the hard way?"

Keith, who'd planted himself at the heart of the room so that he could scowl at everything with equal suspicion, cocked a brow. "What's the hard way?"

Shiro laughed, though he couldn't have said why. "Maybe it's not that hard," he said. 

He plunged his arm into the data-socket. Pressure flared around the steel, white-green electricity skittering through the joints and sensor-pads, seething around him in restless fangs. Sweat pricked along the roots of his hair; a grinding, magnetised ache swelled through every muscle. Shiro dug in, watching as sparks went jittering from board to board, as _error, error_ bloomed across every display, all the force of a city's comm-systems surging around him. The workstation rocked. Heuristics sputtered and glitched through the pixellating screens, then burst. Shorted out.

He drew back. The stillness beat with starlight.

Panel by panel, the workstations lit up again. A silicon buzz rose through the room. A command window flashed open before him, cursor winking in empty strokes.

" _How_ —"

In a bolt, Keith was across the room. His fingers ground into Shiro's shoulder. The weight scorched through him in an instant. His throat ached, singed with a bitterness that had no name at all. "I've seen these old comm systems before, Keith," Shiro said. "Usually they have a back-up system for data storage, separate from the rest of the power grid." He looked down; his fist flexed, joints and pistons turning and glittering without a stutter. "The system's running on auxiliary power now. We should have access to the basic emergency functions until an authorised user logs on again."

"How," Keith bit out, "did you know that would _work_."

Moonlight stripped Keith bare: the bruising bow of his mouth, his glare as stark as bone. He reached up, brushing Keith's knuckles, and felt the waiting flinch. "Sorry," said Shiro, quieter. "Didn't mean to scare you."

"You didn't," said Keith, hoarse and hot. "You didn't, Shiro." But he breathed out, and caught Shiro's hand in his. Their fingers laced together, thumb skimming the arch of his palm. A last spark wound through his nerves, simmering down his spine.

He let go.

In shared silence, they turned to the workstations. The bit-drive clicked into the data-socket. Windows flipped open across the screens, black boxes swarming with labyrinths of code. Shiro sank into the closest seat. He started to sift through files. Images rippled in grainy waves: document scans, gridded blueprints churning in three dimensions, light-streaked photographs of cracking grey streets—

Keith stiffened. Shiro glanced over, and rose. "Find something?"

"I think it's the shipment," Keith said. He was watching the screen with narrowed eyes. "But—that doesn't make sense." 

"Is it still there?"

Without a glance, Keith shifted to a side. An old habit: never explain when you can demonstrate. Shiro braced against his chair. A new picture wove through the screen, pixels splitting and gathering into bolted walls and gravity shields; a craggy, shining crate hunched on a holographic platform like a leviathan. "This is the storage room from the facility eight months ago," Keith said. "It looks like they checked the shipment in here right after Aaklir handed it over. It's been in processing since then."

"Why 'in processing'?"

"It's an old storage facility. All of the towers are. The system doesn't let you key in other statuses to store something."

Shiro leaned down. A crick lit in his neck; he ignored it. "I forgot how big the shipments get. Looks like it barely fits in there."

"Right. It wouldn't have been easy to move." He swiped at the glass. A reel of photographs blurred by: the shipment turning above the floor. Flecks of rust, moss, and paint chips. Supervisors winding around it in snapshot flashes, green and bright then gone. "Based on the logs, everything in the room stayed the same until about a month ago. Temperature, weight, preservation processes. Then it disappeared."

Shiro stared at the chipped floor-tiles, the platform drifting above it in a lofty neon breath. "Weird," he said, and could have laughed at himself; the word was nowhere near enough. "Can you expand the parameters for the search? Let's try comparing the facility conditions right before the disappearance to the conditions after it happened."

"Uh," said Keith. "Give me a minute. Pretty sure there's a setting for that."

His fingers wove across across the screen in sharp, painting strokes. The screencaps melted back to the default screen, and new tables spilled through the glass. "Okay. This table's the factory data from the time right before the delivery," Keith said. "Atmospheric pressure, oxygen levels, pillar maintenance, chemical neutralisation. And this is the data for those from today."

Shiro traced a graph: hours riding a lazy wave of data-points, numbers shivering in slim grey cells. "Are you sure? Most of these are ... pretty different."

"The factory generates the reports, Shiro. I didn't mess with them."

"I'm not saying you did," Shiro said, and stopped again; in this, he was no better than Keith had been. "Look—I'm not great at explaining the technical stuff. Just pick any two system conditions and compare the numbers."

Keith drew his hand aside. His fingers curled against Shiro's wrist, as his gaze skimmed through the lines; he breathed out, soft and rough. "Are their life-support systems breaking down?"

"That'd be one explanation," said Shiro. "But I'm not so sure. Look at the acceptable margins instead of the daily stats. They keep shifting. Before the shipment showed up, the factory's margins for maximum waste buildup was," he knocked the axis of a graph, "down here. Now it's almost three times what it used to be. Same thing goes for those pillars in the factory. In the last eight months, something doubled their maximum bearing capacity to keep up with the rest of the buildup."

"The pillars hold up the surface," Keith said. "Without them, this place would collapse." 

They looked at each other.

"Think this is connected to the shipment?"

"I think," said Shiro, "there's a reason those guards were moving people around the sectors."

  
  
  
  
  


Morning came before Vro-Seiira's tower sent back its answer.

This time, no court met them at the door. A scribe-bot steered them through the open cannon chamber and into an iron stairwell. The lower workings of the ministry were skeletal and endless. They stamped through a sinking reel of hallways, stucco walls polished by narrow, staring bulbs.

The room where they came out looked nothing like the rest of the tower. It was a boxy chamber, plain to the point of archaic, with low joists and spare lighting, its polished floors blotched with ancient smears of oil. Vro-Seiira was braced before an array of screens, dressed in light aramid armour. Qival slouched beside her, all sleek and studded smiles; one elbow jittered in the unmistakable pattern of a man discreetly picking at his datapad. Aaklir had draped xirself over the single chair in the room, and was picking at xir teeth with a restless silvery pin. 

"Paladin," Vro-Seiira said. Her thigh twitched, knee thudding into bone; Qival winced and lowered his screen. "Admiral. We were surprised to receive your meeting request."

"Well, I appreciate that you showed up on short notice," Shiro said. "Any news about the shipment?"

"We have not yet discovered any further traces of the culprit," said Vro-Seiira. Each word rose with the tense, husky inflection of a touched bell. "But we hold faith. Our records show that nothing has left this planet. Therefore it remains in the possession of Vro-Seiira-Geo. We look forward to its retaking, and to the continued recovery of our world."

She looked no different than she had in the cannon chamber, rumpled and cynical, all muscle and armoured resolve. But there was a lightness in the way she moved through the room, like a cat in her own territory. He could not guess, from looking at her, whether she knew what they'd found.

"That's good to hear," said Shiro. "But that gets me to my next point. I didn't realise how much trouble I'd be putting on you when I came. I'd like to leave you some space to deal with your problems." He glanced back. Keith shifted on his heels, a hand propped by his hilt. "Keith's got a mission to handle after this. I'd rather not take him too far out of his way just to get me back to my ship. So I'll be asking the Atlas to come for me in a week."

"In its informal capacity."

"That's not how it works," said Shiro, with the gentle regret of a man overshadowed by his own diplomatic immunity. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Aaklir shift. "The Atlas doesn't get to be off-duty. Whatever my crew sees when they pick me up, they have an obligation to report it to the Coalition."

The words hung in the air, steel swaying on a thread.

"We are not a member of the Coalition," said Vro-Seiira. "It is not our duty to permit a ship of unsanctioned territories to enter our system."

Shiro looked at her. Her cut-glass jaw, her knuckles jutting along the desk. An old, tired fury jumped beneath his ribs. He'd guessed, and been right: they couldn't admit to Vro-Seiira that they'd broken into her factory and tower. A confession only worked if they were telling her something that she didn't know and hadn't intended. On the scales of Vro-Seiira-Geo, the break-in would weigh as nothing less than a betrayal—the first flag of an invasion.

"I know it's not," he said. "Right now."

Move and countermove. It'd been easier when he hadn't known how the game was played.

Vro-Seiira rose. "If you will not respect the autonomy of our planet," she said, "can you guarantee that your officers will be subject to the same rules and privileges that we have granted to you? That no soldier of yours will interfere with a decision which does not affect them?"

"The Coalition can help you," Keith said, sharp and ringing. "Why're you trying to keep them out?"

"If you have never bled for your own independence," said Vro-Seiira, "there's little that we can tell you."

Her echo lashed the room. In the thorned silence, Qival scratched his cheek. "Kuzrel," he said, "you're being irrational, don't you think? One visit from the Coalition isn't gonna break the planet. Vrek me, it's not like Aaklir hasn't been telling you the same thing—"

"A thing that does not need repeating every centiday," Aaklir said. Xe twitched xir head, quick as a waiting crow. "Don't overstep and then come back to blame it on me, eh."

Qival drummed along the desk, and turned. Vro-Seiira looked at him with the eyes of a woman seeing fire crawling through a new green field. "Listen to your allies," he said. All of his brusque, sweeping mockery had faded from his mouth. "Not all your feedback's gonna be _yes-sir_ and _sure-sir_. Be practical. This isn't an imperial planet now. If you don't take action when your people need you, someone else's gonna step up."

Vro-Seiira moved. 

Even watching, he couldn't see the heartbeat where her decision came. The world split in two. There was the moment before, and everything after—the sling of her shoulders like gunmetal, her fingers gripping Qival's throat, neat as a key into its lock. "You overreach yourself," said Vro-Seiira, and dragged him up.

Shiro moved, but Keith was faster. He lunged across the room. His fingers caught Vro-Seiira's wrist, twisting as Qival swayed, suspended and unresisting. "Let him go _now_."

Qival bit out a sound, harsh and wracked. His hands hung at his side, yielding. His eyes glittered through the empty silence, clusters of lights like nail-points.

"Vro-Seiira," Aaklir said. Xir voice carried, lighting the room up to the rafters. " _Vro-Seiira_! Tsah—look, quick, at your alerts."

At her desk, a holo was beating in magnetic pulses, black and violet by turns. Vro-Seiira's fist clenched. Her gaze flashed down like the arc of a knife.

Her arm dropped. Qival crumpled to his knees. Vro-Seiira struck off Keith's grip without a glance, turning back to her desk. She'd forgotten them; every inch of her had coiled taut, fangs bared in focus, watching the reports blaring across every screen. He knew that tension down to his bones. 

"You can't keep us here," Shiro said. Behind him, Keith was kneeling, guiding Qival to sit, steadying him as he heaved with rasping paper breaths. He pressed on. "Something's happening in the factory. And whatever it is, I'm betting you don't have the forces to cover it. You need as much help as you can get."

Vro-Seiira jerked. Her glance swept the room, distracted, glossy with numbers and tangling grids. "It appears that one of the factory pillars has sustained damage."

" _What?_ "

"The situation is contained," Vro-Seiira said, mouth cinching. "Our patrols are attending to the matter. _Stop_."

The warning rang out too late. Keith was already halfway to the doors; his stride didn't falter. "Your patrols are going to need all the help they can get. You can't keep us here."

"Don't mistake patience for a limitation," Vro-Seiira said. Her voice burned with the fury of a long year, a firestorm stripped down to devastating sound. "You cannot imagine what damage a pillar can do to the underground. You have no idea where your strength should serve. How many do you expect you'll save with nothing but your blind ambition?"

"More than you will," said Keith, "if you're just going to stand in here and wait."

He struck the access pad. The doors parted. Light flushed through him like a flame rising: defiance in the set of his spine and his lifted chin, the mark on his cheek like a scar across the world. He was disaster-limned, incandescent—clear as fire howling at the peak of a mountain, a lion bounding through the stars. 

Armies had fallen to that look. Against it, Vro-Seiira's gaze wavered, and withered away. Her fists ground tight. A hiss trembled in her teeth like a curse.

"Guide them down, Qival," Vro-Seiira said, and the stillness shattered.

  
  
  
  
  



	4. Chapter 4

  
  
  
  
  


An elevator whistled them down to the ministry's hangar: a narrow slice in the earth, overlooking a vast, teeming hollow. Its doors had lidded open; its observation deck roiled with burning shadows from the factory below. Through the glass, Shiro could see gunships racing out to the dark. Troops were marching up through the streets, cutting lines of violet and black, towards some firelit point in the distance.

Qival's crew split across the floor. Soldiers settled in to warm up their own flyers, while the rest headed for the lockers. They checked each piece of armour, feeling out the joints and dents, swapping across the troop for the right sizes: vambraces, boots, faceted helmets gleaming with insectoid lights.

"Oi, over here!" Qival called. His hoarse voice rose like ash; but his smile snapped white through the haze. A ring of keys danced around his claw. "Let's get moving, Admiral. You won't wanna head out by yourself—you aren't even dressed for the party."

"What's happening down there?"

"Looks like a chunk broke off the pillar. Hit one of the down-sector buildings pretty hard. One thing led to another and—" He clapped three times, hands as quick as they'd been in the days before. "We're trying to get the whole sector evacuated, but we've only got so many warm bodies to tell the civilians where to heel. Come on—we could use a couple of heroic faces to calm 'em down."

Shiro glanced back. With his usual ruthless instinct, Keith had arrowed over to the sharpest flyer available: a battered black monitor-ship with floodlights mounted above the wings. "Keith?"

Their eyes caught, hard enough to draw sparks. "You need another ship a lot more than you need bodies on the ground," Keith said to Qival, clear across the hangar. Aaklir hung at his side, bouncing and fidgeting. "We'll cover you."

His fist slammed into the lock. Once. Again. He braced against the handle as something in the door clanked, and wrenched it loose. Above their heads, the monitor-ship's alarm began to blare, lights wheeling in shrill red circles. "Aaklir!"

"Yes!"

Shiro watched as Aaklir dove through the doors. Steel shrieked. The alarms doused into sulky sparks; the engine stirred as the headlamps flared. "Guess I've got a ride," he said.

He climbed into Keith's ship. Aaklir drew the door shut behind him; the engines roared, and they were out, sweeping across the floor and out to the darkening factory. Under the thundering engine, Shiro looked back. At the hangar doors, he could see a figure dressed in aramid armour, alone in the crumbling light.

  
  
  
  
  


It took six minutes to hit the edge of the damaged sector.

Alarms howled in turmoil. Every building in the sector was blazing, flooding light through the factory streets. Above the faceless blocks, he could see the jointed brace of the factory pillar, banded in ancient chromium, its pedestal locked in with heavy studs. Cracks had bitten through the stone. Light glared out through the darkness, a red-eyed gap in the world.

Keith flew them down, swerving through the narrow-set buildings. The streets were clotted and reeling, crowds squirming with animal fear. Windows flared like lenses, shedding light on the troops below. Soldiers were shepherding crowds through the streets. A few faces snapped up as the ship swept over them. Mouths parted across the gathering—coughing, choking, crying out—then were gone again, lost as the ship swung to new heights. "Looks like Qival's people are handling the ground evacuation," Keith said. "Let's head to the production tower."

"Hold on, Keith." At the window, Shiro knelt; but Aaklir didn't look at him. Xe clutched xirself, fist knotted against xir flattened ruff. "Aaklir. Can you help us out?"

"I am an _engineer_ ," Aaklir shrilled. Xe was still staring at the streets below; xir eyes glittered with echoes of rubble and charring. "We crossed _galaxies_ to be safe from this sort of thing—what part of me looks as if I would be any good in a melee?"

Shiro gripped xir arm, bracing xir. A shiver burned through xir, relentless, a fever without sound. "I'm not asking you to be," he said." he said. "But it sounds like Qival could use some help directing traffic. His troops don't have the tech to work together across the factory. Is there anywhere we can take you in the factory where you can help with that?"

Xir gaze jerked from the mazy, swinging sparks.

"I know," Shiro began, but Aaklir touched his arm. 

"Someone like you? No—you never will know. You are too brave for that." Xe twisted, waving over xir shoulder to draw Keith's attention. "Over there first, Keithlir! See: that gigantic communications tower which looks like it is wearing a stupid mushroom cap!"

"You're not helping," Keith said, and swooped out.

They left Aaklir standing on an ashswept platform. The factory turbines had started; the air reeked of dust and charred resin. Shiro made his way to the cockpit as the monitor-ship rose again, churning its way around. He clasped the shoulders of Keith's seat, watching. "What's the plan?"

"The production tower's right across from the pillar," Keith said. "The rest of the sector's packed, but I haven't seen anyone coming from over there. Something's wrong."

Shiro braced over the controls, watching. The production tower struck out of the shrouding shadows like a blade. Its antennae were bowed askew. Lights guttered through every floor in restless, pleading flares. The pillar's shrapnel had missed it, but not by enough. Shards had struck the building as they fell, tearing through glass and steel. The building glittered raw and wounded in the bleaching light, barred on all sides by broken stones. 

They circled the building, rising. Through the smoky windows, he saw lights stuttering, shuddering as fists pounded the glass and faces pressing into the pane, mouth after mouth carved in soundless panic.

"They're trapped," Shiro said. There were soldiers on the roof, guiding smoke-blind, coughing workers into their ship; below, two ships were working to knock the stones aside. But it wouldn't be enough. The roof was teeming already, even as smoke rolled and thickened through the floors, clotting up the light. Faces surged across the glass, alike in seething desperation.

He glanced back. Behind him, the cargohold lay open, vast and waiting. "How many people do you think we can take in here?"

Keith cocked his head. "Guess we'll find out," he said. "Brace yourself."

They circled the tower in taut, measured loops. The workers went skittering backwards, farther with each swing. On the third count, Keith slammed forward, driving the monitor-ship into the windows. 

The world cracked into a shrapnel rush. A hail of glass rang out, reeling with frantic new sirens. The ship's gangplank slid out, snagging against the broken frame, and Shiro was out with the next leaping beat, scrambling down into the throng.

"One at a time," he said, as the shouting dropped. A hundred gazes lit on him, settling like the rays of a beacon. "There're crews standing by to evacuate you on the roof. The ground-floor evacuation should be ready in a few minutes. We're just here to get you out a little sooner."

Shiro took his place at the ledge, guiding people onto the gangplank in a lockstep sequence. The monitor-ship held its altitude as they filed through its doors. 

Smoke and shadows dwindled across the floor. Past the dimness, he could see new troops surging around the tower—clearing out the blocks and ruins, coaxing people down along the roads. Aaklir's voice swelled in the fractured distance, ringing orders through streets out of sight. Little by little, the horizon dimmed; the fire drained out.

When the last nervous bodies were brimming along the ship doors, Shiro stopped the queue. He crossed the gangplank, bracing himself against the frame. "We've still got people coming in on this floor," he called. "A few of them're saying the stairs to the upper levels are gone. I'm going to run a final sweep. Come up and meet me on the roof when everyone's clear."

Through the milling sea, Keith looked back. Light traced his cheek, murmuring gold along the curve of his mouth. He might have been a vision, a dream torn out of the fire, an impossible trick of need and memory. "I'll meet you on the roof," he echoed. His jaw worked; he looked away. "Just hurry."

Shiro nodded, and ran.

The hallways wended around him like a maze, reeking of film and electrical fire. He went from room to room, passing through lightless cubicle spaces scattered with office relics: a broken screen, an upended table. The air thickened, overlaid with the sharpness of sweat and burning. Here and there, he found people crouched in corners, waiting for the last quake—people drowsing, fear-drunk, on workbenches out of sight. He coaxed each of them to their feet, and watched them go stumbling out to the safe paths before he turned away.

In the dark, his lungs ached with smoke.

He went on, jumping the broken stairs, winding through the halls. Sensation filtered through his body with the mechanical consciousness of a faraway device: legs pumping, each turn of his right arm slinging eerie fluorescence through the haze. He called out, but the smoke swallowed his voice. A fire must have started in the building after all; the air was thickening, clotted with chemical bitterness and something acid, alien.

Shiro gripped the stair-railing. He kept climbing. The rooms rolled past him in an empty paper reel, doors flashing like blank screens. There was a resonance in the walls—the faltering creak of steel at its limit. A warning. 

But there was only one way out now. He couldn't stop, and look out, and hope that Keith would see him in time. Every hesitation was a heartbeat lost.

_Just hurry_.

The hallways sang out as he passed, empty and dreaming. His body ached with a livid, crackling weight, fist prickling damp, heartbeat drumming against his ribs. _Keith_ , he thought, and it swept him like a storm. Keith in the dark: his heavy lashes, his callused hands. The cast of his mouth when he caught the punchline of a joke. His old, warm habit of leaning close, shoulder to shoulder, his breath drifting up like sunlight. The way they still fit together, after all their years away—pressing for answers in Qival's ship, side by side before Vro-Seiira, in the cockpit of the monitor-ship as it lunged towards the glass. 

The steps trembled. Elsewhere, windows were breaking, fire and steel roaring into the street. Ahead of him, there were no floors left—only a flat, unyielding blackness. 

He hurled himself forward. His shoulder crushed into metal. The door shrieked, thudded, and was still. Shiro swallowed, tasting ash. Outside he could hear the drone of Qival's flyers, soldiers' voices winding through the night. His thighs ached; his fingers scraped sparks down the steel. He slung his weight against the door again, pounding at the metal, and heard them drifting away: the last carrier-ship, and every worker with it.

He'd survived worse. He was close. There was only one lock left.

He struck again. Again. The rhythm bolted through him in flashes. Keith would come before the building fell. He'd come before the end. He always had. 

There was no universe where Keith wouldn't find him.

Something clanked. The metal strained, and broke. Shiro plunged into the open air. He collapsed on the roof, gasping, pulling at the air as if he could swallow the night whole. The earth-lights swung in dizzy stars overhead. Across the sector, ships were singing like constellated fire, bearing their passengers away to safety.

He lifted one arm, then the other. He was shaking, shaking down to his marrows. 

Shiro collapsed, and started to laugh.

All around him, the sector was alight with ash and disaster. He couldn't get up, and smoke brimmed on his tongue, bitter down to his teeth. But he had lived through it all: the crumbling rooms, the creeping fire, the blind and endless run to the rooftop. He'd fought for himself, and he'd won.

He'd won.

Somewhere, elsewhere, a droning thunder was rising. Shadows came spilling across the cement, and footsteps raced after them. 

_Shiro!_

A memory caught him. Through his fading vision, he knew. Swaying dark hair. A hard mouth, drawn soft. The weight of his callused fingertips, gentle as the dawn.

"Keith," Shiro said, and gave himself up to dreaming.

  
  
  
  
  


_Shiro_.

The world swayed around him, weightless, shapeless. Sparks whirled underneath his eyelids, lacing and unraveling in waves. A dream, he thought, or a memory. Under the haze, it was impossible to know the difference. He might have been drifting through a lilting deep-sea current, lifting his head towards the shimmering above. He might have been dreaming in that space between sleeping and waking. A dream of fire, rising into the desert summer.

Shiro breathed in. In the distance, the voice was still calling. Its echoes brimmed in his veins. He knew that sound—its tenderness, its relentlessness. The way it could reach him through the heart of a fire, a deepwater sky.

His heels twitched; his throat thickened, swallowing. Around him, the fog was lifting, sparks into tides, the edges of his drowsy vision spinning into endless light.

"—here," the voice was saying. "They cleared the building because of you, Shiro. You got them out. We're safe now. Everyone's safe."

His eyes lidded open. 

Light struck him hard, dazzling everywhere, carving a vicious halo around Keith's face. His eyes snapped shut. He caught the windowsill above the bed. His lungs heaved; his breath rolled in his lungs like seawater. "You're here," he said.

"Don't get up," Keith said, as Shiro pitched forward. He gripped Shiro's arm, bracing him. "They had to give you something to treat the smoke inhalation. They said it might have some weird effects, but it works fast. It—" He breathed out, a baleful rush. "Can you see me?"

The world stood out in pinpricks and filigree lines, contours needling through the miasma. If he focused on a single point, it would blot out; but he could look at things sidelong, tracing their shapes and colours at the edges of his eyes. "Not—exactly." He reached out; his fingers hooked over Keith's just before he could pull away. "How long was I out?"

"Almost twenty-four hours. They don't exactly get a lot of humans out here. They had to make sure whatever they did wouldn't hurt you." He stopped, breathing in. "How do you feel?"

The question startled him. "Fine," Shiro said at once, then laughed at himself. "I promise I'm fine, Keith. Actually, I feel pretty good."

Keith scoffed; but his fist tightened against the sheets. "Right," he said. "I guess the painkillers kicked in."

Shiro sank back. Someone'd crammed three pillows onto his bed; they puffed behind him in a sterile cloud. "Whatever happened, Keith—it's all right. Honestly, at this point, I think I could adjust to anything except losing my hair."

Keith frowned. He leaned up from his chair; the air whispered with paper and filmy salt. His fingers raked through Shiro's hair: once and again, in quick, paring strokes. 

"Keith," Shiro said. His hand snapped up; but Keith had already pulled away. He touched his own hair, bemused. "What was _that_?"

"I'm showing you your hair didn't go anywhere," Keith said, darkly. "They said you wouldn't have any adverse effects. You just need another day's rest. Stay down."

"It's nice how you think I can't hear that you're also wearing a patient's gown." The adrenaline of the climb had smoothed out of his limbs; all of his bruising pooled into a deep, satisfied ache. It was easier to move like that: unthinking. His thumb rubbed Keith's knuckle as he sank back. "Are you going to tell me what happened?"

"I," said Keith. "Nothing."

Shiro turned towards him. He waited.

"They made me get a check-up after someone told Vro-Seiira what we did with the ship," Keith said in a rush. His shoulders prickled up, a radiant fuming. "I didn't even have any fractures."

Shiro laughed, low in his throat. "We must be getting old. I remember when we used to take out three rebellions in a week, no problem."

"Is that what this is?"

"I could be wrong," said Shiro, a little wry. "But this doesn't seem like a programming error that everyone happened not to notice over the last eight months. This feels like a plan."

Keith's grip twitched into his, a reproof of skin to steel. "I don't think you know what _rest_ means." The chair squeaked, then was still. "Say you're right. What happens if Vro-Seiira-Geo dies out?"

"The system shields go down. Right? The last remnants of the Empire's shielding technology could probably be worth a lot to the right people." His breath curled through his teeth in a thoughtful hiss. "What else's in this system that's worth protecting?"

"Aaklir." The answer came without hesitation, neat as clockwork; but there was rust in Keith's voice as he worked through the thought. "But that doesn't make sense. Xe had to leave xir planet because the Siuegir wanted xir gone."

He thought of the loft that they'd laid open to him. Sunlight lingering on gold-white rope. Holoprints of power receptors and saltwater batteries, strung across the stones and spooling down the lines. All their delicate and secretive designs, every wire and antenna mapped out like veins trailing into the heart. A single draft of their discarded inventions would have been a prize on so many other worlds. 

"Did xe ever try reaching out to one of the Coalition planets?" said Shiro.

"No," Keith said. He nudged his chair closer to the bed. Beat by beat, their fingers wove together. "Not all of the people who left with Aaklir are here. Xe had two generation-ships with xir when xe left. Getting everyone through the verification process would've taken too long on most of the Coalition planets."

"Two generation-ships." The maths rolled through the back of his head, a dense and tangling blur. The loft had held about fifty people. A fraction of a generation. "Does Vro-Seiira know that?"

"Yeah. It was xir first broadcast into this system. But even if she'd said no—I don't know if xe would've tried with a Coalition planet."

"What?"

"Not everyone gets what the Coalition does, or how it operates," said Keith. He was frowning again; every word struck like a match. "There're three new treaties every year, and the Coalition doesn't really talk about who's signing which ones, or what's in them besides the stuff that affects your planet, until after you've signed. It feels like you need to know someone high-up in the Coalition just to keep track of what you're getting into."

"The signatories just want to make sure no one starts another war, Keith," said Shiro. "That's all."

"I know," Keith said. His breath hitched, and fell. "We need the Coalition. But it's—harder for people to figure things out when they're outside the system. I'm pretty sure Aaklir'd be okay with Vro-Seiira-Geo joining if xe could negotiate for them from the beginning."

Aaklir, magpie-boned and quick on xir feet, who'd sifted through the whole mazy loft for a chair he could use to sit. The drumbeat of xir heels against the silkscreen, telling stories of all the regimes that had lived and lost. _You cannot compromise on what you know is right._

"Let's put that down as one theory," he said. "Someone's been chasing Aaklir since Siuegir. They only started a few months ago because it took them a while to break through the system shields. Even if that's true, we'll need a lot more information to stop them."

"Guess I shouldn't have skipped all those classes on being a space detective."

In spite of himself, Shiro laughed. Warmth stirred beneath his ribs like a wingbeat, a signal from a distant shore. "Look at you, playing smart when I'm down. I see how it is."

Through his lidded eyes, he saw the filmy bow of Keith's head, his slantwise smile. "Just trying to stay ahead of you," he said. 

He'd seen that smile a hundred times over: slung over his shoulder in a race through the desert; across a long table at sunset; draped in the static of light-years. The first face he'd seen after resurrection, breathing in a whole new life. He'd known what it meant, then: leader, brother-in-arms, two stars grown out of the same cosmological spark. Nothing had changed since.

His hand curled away; he braced himself, shifting his weight against the cot. "All right," Shiro said. "Let's think about this. We know that we don't have enough information right now. What would help us narrow the suspect pool down?"

"Knowing who the real target is. What kind of resources they can access." Keith leaned back in his chair, mapping each point with a blade's precision. "What made them target the pillars and the terraforming shipment. What their deadline is."

"Deadline?"

"Whoever's doing this," Keith said, "we know they have some kind of control over the factory systems. Vro-Seiira's a new leader. Not everyone wants her in charge. They wouldn't have to hit everyone on the planet at once to take out the planet. Killing Vro-Seiira and Qival means no one'd be left to operate the factory. The entire system would break down in a year. If that was the only thing they cared about, they could've done it by now."

"Well, that's dark. You really don't think they'd band together?"

"I know what the Galra'd expect them to do," said Keith.

The words filtered through him, and he understood. The underground city, drenched in Galra colours, its walls thick with army steel. The hard-edged accent on Vro-Seiira's rough voice. The images that traced through his dreams still, drawing memories in branding lights across the backs of his eyes when they talked about the army, or the prisoners of the arena.

They'd made a good ending—better than anything that he'd dreamt, five years ago; but they were all, still, what the Galra had made them.

"Maybe," Shiro said, "we're looking at this the wrong way."

"What do you mean?"

That was the thing about Keith—the shining, ever-fixed thing. There was no question that couldn't be traced to an answer; there was no world too far gone to be saved. "Odds seem pretty good that whoever's doing this is still on the planet," Shiro said at last. The air scraped dry over his tongue. "Or somewhere they can see the results of what they're doing. We know that they might not like the idea of Aaklir staying here, and we definitely know that they wanted to take out a few of the sectors underground. That narrows down the places they're likely to target. We know that now."

"Yeah?" said Keith—and that too was surrender of a kind, yielding word by word. "So what's next?"

On impulse he reached out. His steel fingers nudged Keith's cheek. "Right now, we watch," Shiro said. "And we wait. Think you can handle it?"

Keith's hand slid over his. In the bottleglass light, he looked like the boy that he'd been before the end of the war: rumpled dark hair, shadows rusting under his eyes, his crooked mouth a soft and dreaming shape. 

"Sure," he said. "I can handle you."

  
  
  
  
  


Vro-Seiira came to them in the afternoon, two days after they returned from the sector.

Her scribe-bot trundled in through the doors of their elevator, soot-lined and creaky with sand. It ushered them out of the tower and into a milky afternoon. A hover-rig was floating at the crest of a dune, hull striped in ghosting greens, curling with the draconic corners of a pagoda. Alone, perched on its box seat, Vro-Seiira put out a heavy, polished hand. "This is not a summons," she said as they climbed towards her. "But we would welcome a few hours of your company, if you are willing."

Keith tensed. His steps ground across the sand. "Where're we going?"

"Driving, for a few circles," said Vro-Seiira. His vision hadn't come back in full yet; there was a halo everywhere he looked, from the horizon to the roads. In the double-light, Vro-Seiira rose, hollow and shining, daylight and heatstruck steel. "The rig was previously used for official visits. It has the most efficient cooling system of our current designs. We thought perhaps you would enjoy a change in climate for a little while." 

"The most efficient, until _I_ have time to look at it," said Aaklir, from the rig window. Xir face hovered above xir bristling elbows, stiff and green-cast, clinging to the steel as if through a maelstrom. "Never—mrrh. Never settle for outdated things."

Vro-Seiira glanced through the screen between them. Her eyes lidded. "Ah, yes," she said.

Shiro caught Keith's eye. There was a thrum in her voice that they hadn't heard before: languid and steady as an engine. "Thanks," said Keith, closing the last distance up to the wing. "We appreciate it."

They climbed into the hover-rig. A drifting coolness tumbled over them like dreaming snow. Aaklir had gathered up the few thin cushions across the seats and was clutching them to xir chest. Xe squinted at Keith with one eye, lopsided, then slung one cushion at Shiro. "Brace yourselves," xe said grimly.

Outside, Vro-Seiira laughed. Her shoulders rolled in an armoured tide. Her heavy fist flashed, twisting the guidance reins.

The skies went plunging into dust. Winds shrilled, rising; the desert flamed past in jadeglass bursts. Keith crammed against him in the narrow seats. He gripped Shiro's knee, a clumsy anchor, as the rig guttered and flew. Vro-Seiira had braced over the box's edge, every inch of her set like a blade. She drove the way Garrison cadets did after their first flight: rough and ringing, pushing every planetary limit just to feel them burn. It was the first time since they'd come that she looked at rest: reckless and wind-wild, grinning with unholy joy into the blinding skies.

Their speed dropped as the rig pulled back into the range of the towers. Scouts were racing along the panels, scuttling in and out from the earth, calling instructions through the long shafts down to the factory. Vro-Seiira'd tipped back against the seat; her head lolled, watching their work. "Thank you," she said.

"Uh, you're welcome," said Keith, a breathless reflex. His brows ticked down. "For what?"

"For _what_ ," Vro-Seiira echoed. She didn't turn, but her accent skewed with a rare smile. "Our factory is the pride of this planet. You could have saved any one of the lives in that building, and you would have more than earned the clay and steel of us. You have exceeded the bounds of your debt as a guest. What I owe to you is beyond the measure of law."

She spoke without force. But there was something under the words, too deep for their translation overlays could reach: bright as steel against the anvil, the shining, earthy crackle of a shape in the kiln.

Somewhere in the tumult, he'd hooked his arm around Keith's hip. With care, Shiro peeled himself away. His hands curled, one inside the other, tightening. "I'm not that interested in keeping track of debts," he said to the screen. "But there's something I've been meaning to ask you. I'm not sure it's my business—especially since I'm not here on Earth's behalf."

Vro-Seiira looked back. Her gaze swept over him in a dark ray. "Ask."

"Why," said Shiro, "is everyone still underground?"

The faded dunes shifted in the quiet. Vro-Seiira drew herself up, cocking one arm along the rim of the box, lashes jutting with dusky thought. She had, he thought, expected the question. "The desert is yet unsafe. It will take time, and further resources, to design the appropriate shelters. We cannot favour some of our people, and not others. All must rise, or none."

"But you haven't even started building," said Keith. He was looking now, too, as if seeing the world anew: the furling, green-copper wasteland, towers seething like broken fangs, tongues of smoke spooling out from the gaping panels. Nowhere to hide, no matter the secret, even if you tried for the rest of your days. "What're you still waiting for?"

"The end of the war," Shiro said.

Keith scoffed; the spark of his breath curved between them. In her seat, Vro-Seiira turned her head. "We are aware that Zarkon fell years ago," she said.

"Are you?"

He heard the smile in her voice, all fangs and knife-edged spite. "To what end do you mean to send your questions? Would you have them raised up to live _here_?" Her hands fanned out, a blacksmith's wide gesture, mapping and damning the desert at once. "This land of opportunity? Seeded by the shrapnel of our emperor, miles above access to the hydroponics system? Truly, we have deprived them."

"When was the last time any of them saw the sun?"

Light struck Vro-Seiira like a gauntlet. Her shoulders tightened; but she didn't speak.

Shiro stopped. He'd used his voice to inspire people before: at the Garrison; across a sun-sweetened table ringed by diplomats; on the bridge of the Atlas with his crew shining in seabed colours. All these years of peace, and he hadn't learned the words for this. What he could offer to a leader who gazed across her own world, and measured only its smoke and rubble. How to count the days until the war faded from their bones. 

"I'm not planning to bring the Coalition down here if you don't need our help," Shiro said at last. A memory flickered in his throat—a moonlit room, tables of data scattered like shrapnel. He swallowed it. "But I think you know that you have to start taking action. Your pillars are failing. Your factory's running out of supplies. You need to move forward before you land in the middle of an emergency you can't control."

On impulse, he looked back. "Tsih," said Aaklir, elbowing a cushion. "What?"

"Keith told me you're expecting a few more generation-ships to land here in the next year," Shiro said. "Do you think they can handle living in an underground sector?"

Aaklir smoothed xir glimmering ruff. "Not all of us are so powerful that we can repay our debts in a single day," xe said. Xir face shone, rootless and polished as reflection. "I decided to trust Vro-Seiira's judgment on the day that we landed here. Do not ask me to stray now."

"Aaklir," said Keith.

His voice seemed to startle xir. Aaklir's head jerked, loops prickling up along xir nape. But xe settled again, intent glossing over fury. "Tsah, Keithlir," xe said. "You are true to your ways. Now let me be true to mine, eh?"

"You—" said Keith, and they broke off into their own private exchange, voices mixing in a lilting, fuming froth. But Vro-Seiira was still looking at him, the gaunt, studying eyes of a commander sifting through a mission report.

"What is your plan?" she said.

"To get your citizens back to the surface?"

"To let them live here safely."

A question that sharp was, by default, a dismissal or a challenge. What she needed was an engineer, a xenobiologist, or at the very least a historian—someone who'd seen the worst fates that a planet could survive, and the steps that came after survival. He couldn't answer for this dusty, faceted planet, this world that he'd known for six days and understood for none. He'd barely answered it for himself.

His mouth had gone dry; his veins echoed with the coolness curling along the walls of the rig. What could be made of Vro-Seiira-Geo? A pale green desert where nothing could grow. An underground city braced and bound in steel. A land whose only legacies were the warships and weapons that had wrecked so many stars.

"Break the desert open," Shiro said.

Vro-Seiira stared. Her laughter roared into the sky like smoke.

"I'm serious," he said, when she had settled enough to let him speak. "I've seen your underground supports. The machines you used to build them are still here, aren't they? If you've got people who know how to use the tech, you could probably use the ships to strip away a few layers of earth. Once the ground's laid open, you can take the weight off the pillars and bring them down safely."

"An interesting compromise," Vro-Seiira said, eyes lidding. "You have accepted that we cannot expose our people to the world above. So you propose that we strip away their only shield instead, in the most dangerous way possible. Bring all of our dangers down to their level."

Every word flared on her tongue, bitter as living coal; but he knew that fire, and what it meant. "You're right about that," Shiro said. "Doing this is risky. But if you keep telling yourself that you have to take it slow, I think you're always going to find another reason not to move on."

"What should I trust, if not reason? We have citizens whose families are Galra, who were cut off from flying to see their relatives since Zarkon discovered that Voltron still lived." She was smiling; but her voice seethed through her teeth, sharp enough to choke. "Our ancestors were his footsoldiers. We took every test and trial invented by the Druids before a single one of his kind was put under their blades. We built his cannons, his armoury, every panel and frame of his flagship. We were the best of his vassals, as we needed to be. And now there is no one in the universe who would look at our history and forgive us."

"Do you want Zarkon back?" Keith said.

"Of course not!"

"Okay," said Keith, comet-eyed, neat as a knife. "Then I don't get the problem."

Vro-Seiira barked another laugh; the sound jumped like fire through glass. But Shiro understood. Keith's tone had the simplicity of a child's question; but it'd been a long time since Keith was that young. _I know what the Galra would expect them to do_ , he'd said. He knew the limits of the Coalition. How to map the pulse-points of an alien city in a single day. The way that an enemy might look at a struggling planet and reach out to snuff its light.

It wasn't a question. It was a promise.

"Keith's right," he said, before Vro-Seiira's scorn could rise again. "You don't need to be a part of the Coalition to have its protection. We can't ask you to follow our regulations—but we can make sure that our members respect the rights of your system."

Vro-Seiira's gaze swung from face to face. Her fist clenched against the wall, then unraveled. "Aaklir. How long would it take to safely remove the layers which cover the damaged sector?"

Aaklir looked back through the silence, a bird at the edge of a field-fire. "Is that what you would like?"

"Let us say," said Vro-Seiira, "for the sake of our promises, that we do."

Aaklir's shoulders swayed; xe hooked a loosening cushion and crushed it down against xirself again, little gestures gone mute with thought. "Given the right equipment, and the materials to reforge," xe said. "Hm. Half an apogee, perhaps."

"Half an apogee, then," said Vro-Seiira, like a pact.

"Half an apogee," Shiro echoed, nonsensically. "Two _weeks_?"

"Tseh!" Xir voice brimmed over his, a blithe and beating wing. "This work will require a lot of stimulants, of course—it is going to be a difficult project. And I cannot guarantee that it will be so short. There must be a margin of error if more than fifteen percent of your workers refuse to take the task, or cannot learn to manage the equipment in one."

"They will learn it," said Vro-Seiira.

"Do you," said Shiro, groping through the exchange like a man fumbling to catch raw fire, "have equipment already?"

"Was it not part of your own proposal? Old ships can be repurposed." Aaklir lifted xir chin. "It is high time that we began to use them anyway; they have only been sitting around for many years."

He wasn't an architect, or a mathematician. He couldn't argue about the merits of Aaklir's calculation. But there had to be some piece missing here. Vro-Seiira's workers would be working through the desert heat, dust and ancient chemicals filming over their mechanical vision, churning up the earth at a rate unlike anything seen since the war began. "I've worked with contractors before," said Shiro. "That seems like the kind of work that should take months."

"Aaklir," Keith said, quieter. "Are you sure?"

Aaklir tilted xir head, eyes bright as the desert sky. "Just watch me, so," xe said.

  
  
  
  
  


Vro-Seiira left them after a while, but they had the hover-rig for the rest of the day. They came back to the guest-tower just before dusk, to cool rooms and a sky filigreed with auroral colours, all roses and liminal greens. It was Keith's turn to thread a meal out of the slim pickings in the tower pantry; so Shiro left him squinting at jars and vegetable cages, and pitched down the hall to shower in his own suite.

The lights were burning as the doors drew apart. He stopped at the threshold; his metal fingers knotted tight. "Qival," Shiro said. "I wasn't expecting you."

Slouched against the sill, Qival scratched his nape. His soldier's mask swayed loose on a thread. "Figured you wouldn't want somebody waiting for you in the dark," he said. "Where's the other one?"

"He's getting some things together," Shiro said, easy. "Can I help you?"

That stirred him. Qival rose, one hand hooked in his pocket. "Heard Vro-Seiira came by."

Shiro smiled a neat, spare smile, and folded his arms. "She just wanted to show us some tech we haven't tried out yet. I guess even prime ministers get restless."

Without Vro-Seiira and Aaklir, Qival seemed to unbow again. The taut, sour set of his jaw sweetened, and he grinned back. "Yeah. I heard about that. Right after she met with you, she tore back into her tower and got the rest of the ministers together. The whole parliament went into an emergency session. You wanna guess what they did?"

It was the voice that he'd used on his ship, like a hook squirming in the water. "You've been waiting for a couple hours," Shiro said. "It's probably faster if you tell me."

Qival turned back to the window, and swiped it into clarity. The last rays of sunset came dazzling through the glass. Filmy visions rolled through the chromium band at his throat, unbruised by any palm or fingerprint. "They approved a proposal from the Siuegir to start excavating the factory. Critters're gonna be teaching us how to use the old warship tractor-beams for it, and everything."

"You don't sound too happy about that."

"Nah," said Qival, with a dry lilt. "Just had a bug in my ear about it. Couldn't figure out where in vrek those kids got that idea from. But I'm starting to figure it out."

No one on Vro-Seiira-Geo had been harder to read than Qival, with his prickling smiles and his loud, deliberate gossip; but this fuming interest had a heaviness that he knew. "Don't you trust the Siuegir?" said Shiro.

Qival glanced back. A fang scathed his lip. "Aw, they're not bad. Brave little cockroaches, in their own way. I've seen their kind before, is all. They're used to starving. If you give them a crumb, they'll grab the loaf and stow it while they chew at you for more. They swallow you whole if you don't keep them in hand."

The word he'd used didn't belong to Vro-Seiira-Geo's dialect. The translator blurred over it; only _cockroaches_ surfaced in his memory when he pieced the moment back together. His hands settled against his thighs, lightless and still. "That doesn't sound like the Aaklir I know," Shiro said.

"'Course not," said Qival, with hard mirth. "The kid knows who xe needs to impress."

"And it's not you."

"I don't impress easy. Well—" Qival slapped his chest, soft beneath the jacket. "Most of me doesn't."

There was a message, he knew, beneath the glittering ease. Raucous, easy Qival, who kept no secrets and could not be cowed, who'd come at the beginning of the war to sell an army to a factory on the verge of lockdown. Qival, who'd turned his throat up to Vro-Seiira's grip like a sacrifice yielding its body to the knife.

Aaklir had been in the room too; but xe hadn't spoken until after Vro-Seiira'd cast Qival aside.

"Don't worry about it, Admiral," Qival said. The hoarseness was, by now, no more than an echo. "Xe's been like that since xe showed up. The kid takes it personally that I'm guarding xir flock, is all. Can't make peace with somebody who just wants to bite your ankles when you're doing your job."

"Tell me what exactly you want, Qival."

Qival's eyes hooded; his jaw set with a disdain that was Vro-Seiira down to the bone. But his mouth tilted, and the echo was lost. "About half a turn and change ago, these Siuegir show up with all these bright ideas, saying they're gonna save us all. Since then," he jerked a thumb across the sands, "they're scrawling in their tower all day. Testing things, banging around like they're loading a cannon, stinking up the sand for klicks around. You've been at least a couple galaxies farther'n me. They the real deal?"

"I don't know what else the Siuegir have proposed to you guys," Shiro said. A half-thought was crystallising on his tongue, on the brink of a shape that could be spoken out loud. "But the terraforming kit they brought you was designed on Earth. I know it'd work here."

"You _think_ it'd work here," Qival said. His eyes lingered on the dunes below. "There's no world out there like this one."

Outside, evening light was filtering through the pluming clouds; Qival's profile brimmed over with its mazy glittering. "I don't know how much has happened between you and the Siuegir," Shiro said. "But Vro-Seiira needs your help. This project's going to be a lot bigger than the Siuegir can handle on their own. If we do it right, countless lives could be saved."

"You really got no faith, Admiral." Qival's voice wheedled like oil along a wheel bearing. "One thing you oughta know about the Daq—our side never loses. What good's a brag like that if you drop a client anytime they look like they're about to fall?"

"So you'll help."

Qival's grin was a scattering of stars. He pinched the fringes of his collar, tugging them over the band around his throat. "Hey," he said. "You name me one time I haven't helped Vro-Seiira-Geo. My band's been handling the sector evacs from the start. We dig ditches, we guard her refugees. Even got a couple of 'em trained on factory inspections a turn ago, so they could give the old supervisors a rest. Don't you tell me that I'm not doing my part."

His smile widened, and Shiro smiled back. The conversation kept running on a track of inset politesse. But that was elsewhere. The words had dropped in the pit of his belly, seething like coals. He could think of nothing else.

A contempt for the Siuegir. Distrust for change. Access to the factory data for months.

_We have not yet discovered any further traces of the culprit,_ Vro-Seiira had said, with Daq guards at every wall, guards marching through her factory. Guards who could control what they would find and miss.

"Right," Shiro said, under Qival's laughter. "I understand."

  
  
  
  
  



	5. Chapter 5

  
  
  
  
  


One week passed; another. Panel after panel opened across the sand. The last city of Vro-Seiira-Geo rose from the dark.

There would never be another restoration like this. Day and night, the towers shimmered behind veils of industrial steam. The Daq gave up their patrols, hammering out their tin shelters for workshops. The Siuegir swarmed across the sands, day by day, teaching a regiment of mechanical burrowers how to carve through the earth.

Keith had a natural hand for the new machines. How to steer them through the passages. The angle to set their claws for a dig. The way their engines thickened as they trailed low on fuel. He wove paths around Shiro, all through the snarling shadows of the factory shafts. In the afternoons, they sprawled together under the awning of a patrol shelter. Keith listened to the Siuegir's instructions on how the underground map had shifted, while Shiro leaned against his back, letting the workers bring him the site's daily arguments. They took turns carrying each other back to the guest-tower at dusk. Clumsy and reeking, every limb rolling like saltwater. He collapsed into bed with Keith's laughter on his tongue. If he dreamed, it was only of sand and lion-bright stars.

On the day of the first panel-breaking, there was a festival.

They went down to the undercity again, in a rickety sketch of an elevator fashioned out of cables and old carts. Seen by filtered daylight, the sector looked like a newly minted world. The streets shone, glossy black streetlamps blooming on military corners. Hydroponic bridges arched between the buildings, threaded in lustrous blue-green vines. On some corner just out of sight, a musician had struck up a beat. A ribboning song of tambourine and strings went spiraling down the street.

"Think he's going to make a move?" said Keith.

He didn't look like he was celebrating anything: standing at parade rest, armour polished, his blade tucked against the dip of his back. But the festival had drawn a sober crowd. There were no banners or games. People passed them in armour, in print-fiber tunics, in the sleek and simple undersuits that they must have once worn to the factory. But there was joy all the same: in their shadows trailing over cement, the burnt-sugar winds, the stunned bright sounds of people haggling at the new food-stalls. They were here, and the universe was still unfurling.

"Shiro," Keith said, again. His mouth glinted with a dangerous curve.

They turned down a narrow street, towards a scent like steamed buns. "It's been two weeks," Shiro said. "Staging something today'd get Vro-Seiira's attention. And this is one of their few chances to take out Aaklir while xe's in the open."

"'They'," said Keith. "You mean Qival."

Shiro's smile cracked with rue. "Still not a detective, Keith. Remember?"

No matter where he was, he couldn't have accused a planet's warleader of treason without evidence; but the principle was heavier here than it would have been anywhere else. He was Earth's representative. The Atlas would come to collect him in a matter of days. What his crew saw of Vro-Seiira-Geo would be the basis for reports to the Coalition for months to come. Even with her cold loyalties, her iron spine, Vro-Seiira wouldn't be the first politician to throw an underling to the wolves in hopes of buying peace.

They couldn't know whether the terraforming shipment and the damage to the factory had been part of the same incident. Opportunity wasn't motive, and motive alone could not be a crime. He didn't have enough; he didn't have anything.

Something bumped his arm. It went drifting steps ahead of him before Shiro remembered it to reel it back. "Sorry," Keith said, amused. His fingers closed around the wrist, bracing it as Shiro checked the angle of his arm. "You're probably right about Qival. But that means we should keep moving if we want to clear this area for anything suspicious."

"And here I thought you were giving me a break today."

"This was your idea," Keith said, with unforgiving practicality. He cocked his head. "You could ... race me for it."

"Remind me how _that's_ a break."

His mouth curled. "If you have to ask, old-timer," said Keith. He tapped the steel rim of Shiro's shoulder twice, like a runner setting his mark—turned, and was gone.

Shiro stared. Keith was already carving a path through the crowd, a wayward summer shadow, twisting with the sure steps of a man whose only compass was himself. Daylight flared around him: a halo, a memory. He was the brightest thing in the sunstruck world.

Shiro pounded after him.

The city flowed around them, sandstone and new lights. Windows opened above their heads, shadows flurrying like wingbeats, as people tended to their windowbox gardens. The sweetness of artificiate flowers swayed through the streets. Old, hunched buildings glowed through his eyelids, steel and stone singing with all the colours of a heliotropic world.

This, he thought—but nothing more came. He was a storm, his heartbeat in thunder, adrenaline racing like lightning. Nothing existed in him but this: the light, the road, the living dare of Keith's silhouette. For the first time in years, he could afford to think about nothing else.

They wove through the avenues, laughing, across the streets and back. Keith skidded into a close-lipped alleyway, and Shiro plunged after him. They were halfway down before they saw its walls narrowing into a dead-end, the fencing strung like fangs ahead. Keith looked up, searching for a chance, an escape, through the fire escapes and steel beams overhead. Without thinking, Shiro jumped up to catch the lowest bar.

His fingers closed over steel. Sky and steel swung around him in a drunken, starless loop. Keith's face flashed through the whirl, black-browed, incredulous—and then he let go, dropping into Keith's outflung arms.

Keith staggered back. They went stumbling up against the wall together, sweat-thick, panting. "Got you," Shiro managed.

"You—" Keith bit out; but he was laughing too. He set Shiro down, fingers clinging to his spine. "What was _that_."

They were out of the sun. Lamplight spilled down Keith's lashes, his salt-gleaming jaw. His pulse pounded into Shiro's chest in firework bursts—the feverlike adrenaline of being run down into the dark. "Maybe you should learn to watch where you're going," Shiro said. "That trick's worked twice on you now."

"And," said Keith, leaning up, "it's never going to work again."

He was close. His face was flushed with it. The strength it'd taken to catch Shiro, arms banded tight, fingers branding down his spine. Keith's mouth curving close under his, like a star pulling him down.

His hand flexed with an aching, ragged thought. He couldn't think of it. He wasn't. "Then I guess I better hold on to you," Shiro said.

He stepped back.

They turned into the street again, shoulders brushing, heads held high, climbing for the higher parts of the city. Shiro bought two ice-like lollies from a lemon-faced vendor, which Keith ate in neat and brutal crunches. From the hill, the festival brimmed through the streets like something from a painting: faceted lights above a glittering river of people. No crowds were lingering, or clumping into knots where they shouldn't. The pillars shone across the sector, scaled and anciently pristine, each as vast as a canyon.

He didn't know that he was looking until his gaze stopped. Static prickled in his spine.

"Keith," Shiro said.

At the sector's end, something had lit along the waist of the pillar: a firefly silhouette, all facets and sparks. A hand, a heel, a silvery head. Keith looked, eyes narrowing as he craned out. "That's one of Aaklir's people," he said. "I—thought they knew they had the day off."

"That's what xe told us," Shiro said.

They drifted up the path. Along the cliff, the walkway split and drifted across the rooftop, brimming silver through the veiling sun. The silhouette was still in motion, quick and deliberate, each glimmer of it a heartbeat which carried across the sector. Shiro's fists tightened. "It's climbing up."

"It knows someone's watching," Keith said, and pitched into a run.

  
  
  
  
  


They tore across the roofs together. The crowds swept out of his vision; there was only the road, steel and fiber concrete, and the sliver of an unrelenting sky overhead. At the edge of the street, the buildings clustered to a halt, stranded from the pillar by a bridgeless distance. Makeshift elevators eddied along the roof, swaying on their cables like bells, each chamber no bigger than a single body. Keith caught two cables, and jerked; their loose ends spilled into his hands. He snapped one into Shiro's grip. "Come _on_ ," he said, and Shiro understood.

"You're kidding."

"Something's happening, Shiro," Keith bit out. "We need to go!"

"Next time," Shiro said, "we're bringing the wolf with us for the chase."

His fist flexed, brightening. He struck each cable with a molten-white hand. The elevators tumbled, clanging; the cables whipped through their whistling pulleys, and they were hurtling, hurtling high—

He hit the platform hard. The impact blared through him. His bones roared with the echoes. "Shiro," Keith called. His voice tore the air in bruising throbs; his fingers dug against Shiro's shoulder. "Shiro, are you—"

"I'm all right," Shiro said. Through his heels, he could feel the city still burbling, a chorus of festival sounds. Neither Qival nor the Daq guards were heading for the pillar. It was Aaklir's friend they'd seen, moving across the platform. No one else was coming. There was no reason to think that there was anything wrong. "Any ideas what it's doing?"

"No." Keith stared upward, fierce-eyed, breaths gone stark and shivering. "It shouldn't be up there. The crew took out the upper joists yesterday. If it moves the pillar off-balance, even a little—"

"It won't," Shiro said. His hand curved against Keith's back, bracing him, drawing them up together. "We're almost there. Let's keep going."

They started to climb. 

The silhouette had melted away. The pillar was a maze of shining ledges and construction mesh, loosened bars curving up to the sun like thorns. Two levels up, there was another makeshift elevator, chipped and shivering on its cables—and above that, the platform that would bring them to the top. Shiro climbed towards it in a blind rush, feeling the hard stretch of his hands and thighs, muscle without armor, shining in the daylight like an open mark.

What did he know about the Siuegir? That they were builders, inventors, protectors. That their loft teemed with children and plans and endless mazy ropes, impossible to cross in secret without a guide. That Aaklir had been cast out from xir planet, empty-handed and xir eyes all hunger, set loose to wander until Keith had given xir the terraforming shipment to trade. That xe had looked at the story of Vro-Seiira's rise to prime minister, and laughed. 

_Aaklir has a fetish for convenience, that's all,_ Shakva had said. _It is easier to bribe a corrupt official than to appeal to one who has an image to preserve._

Aaklir hadn't trusted the Coalition. But xe believed in purity and leverage.

_We crossed galaxies to be safe—_

Steel clanked over their heads, a blur of thunder. Shiro glanced up. A silhouette flashed along the edge, pulsing, and was gone again. "Keith!" he called. He hefted himself up, quick, and caught the back of Keith's boot. "Stop—just listen!"

A sound was churning down through the heavy struts of the pillar. It burred through their fingertips, their teeth, their bones—a dawning, seismic wave. Above them, the elevator swayed, dizzy as a bell. A beam gasped, cracking; a broken strut went whistling into the crowd. Shadows came splintering down the steel. Above them, the crown of the pillar was shaking.

"We have to split up," Keith said. His fist locked against the root of a support beam. "I'll secure the top of the pillar. You take out whatever's making that sound." 

"You have no idea what's waiting up there, Keith—"

"I know we don't have time to figure it out," Keith said, sharper. "I can handle myself. You need to start looking. There has to be a switch, or a detonator. _Something_."

"Keith," he said. There was no other argument in him. "You can't do this alone."

Keith's hands knuckled, as if he were seizing a war-ship's steering. "Sorry," he said.

He jumped, and caught the support beam. His body arced through the sunlight, quicksilver, shattering. Hand whirled over hand in a dizzy chain, and then he was swinging himself through the thin gravity, onto the beam, and—twisting, bucking, straining—reached the elevator cables in one desperate pull.

Swaying, one-handed, Keith brought his blade down.

The elevator fell. The cables shrilled, reeling; sparks flurried into the wind as Keith snapped into the air. Momentum swung him up in a liquid, unforgiving arc. His hand caught the platform. The metal grunted as his grip bit down, and then he was swinging himself over the edge, moving forward and out of sight.

Shiro swallowed. His throat pulsed, aching. He'd shouted when Keith jumped; but he couldn't remember what he'd said. The sound was storming now, coarse as cannonfire, rattling down to his bones. There was nothing else.

He kept climbing in blind, urgent strokes. The mesh gave way, and he was on the platform. His feet stuttered beneath him, thudding across the platform; his ears rang with the maelstrom of it. There was a door, a stairwell, an empty light.

Shiro ran.

The top of the pillar stood bare, scattered with panels and uprooted bolts. Across the floor, Keith was still wrestling with the silhouette—its silver hands, its eyes as blind as knives, burning with a savage radiance. Its voice chirred through the haze, stripped of any feeling, clear as a sword. 

He took a step, and another. His vision swarmed and billowed like a wave. Nausea ghosted through the backs of his teeth, iron and sour, as the ground skewed beneath his feet. "Where is it," Shiro called.

Shakva stilled. Its compound eyes flicked over, and saw him.

One foot forward. Another. Step by marrowing step.

"Shakva—talk to me." His voice rose into the firebrand air. Panels jerked, stuttering all along the rooftop. The pillar shook again, a thousand electrical circuits like struck chords, straining against some invisible hand. "Aaklir brought all of you to this planet for a reason. Xe believed that you could start over here. And you're going to. But you have to trust us. This needs to stop."

The world was spilling into wire, steel melting, sunlight shivering in pixels. His heartbeats ticked through his ribs, bone and memory; his pulse jumped under his skin like a countdown. Shakva hadn't faltered; it twisted, grappling against Keith's weight. _There has to be a switch somewhere_ , but the pillar was empty. He'd seen nothing on his way up—no accomplice, no device, no end in his ascent. Nothing else was here.

Nothing else.

He got it, then.

"Keith," Shiro rasped. His voice cracked; the echoes burred through his bones like the heartbeat before lightning. "Keith, get away from it now—Shakva's the detonator!"

Keith's head snapped up. Their eyes caught.

Shakva laughed, harsh as a lit cannon. It surged against Keith's weight in a livid inhuman coil, kicking him aside. Sunlight bristled across the pillar. Its body flared, incandescent.

Keith skidded across the floor, hand and heels grinding into steel. He went barreling forward again. His fingers closed over Shakva's shoulders as it twisted to its feet.

They plunged off the platform.

The world burned white.

  
  
  
  
  


Later he would remember the world in pieces.

The stillwater air. The steps of the pillar. A body swaying from his arms, heavy as drowning. He knew, he knew—but knowledge was not sinew, blood, or memory. What he knew later was only a story. Something he told back to himself, when the marrows of his remembering bones had been scrawled over with adrenaline and desperation.

Days later, years later, he would tell himself this:

He must have run. The skies reeled, reeking of laserfire. The floors tumbled past him in an empty cascade. Somewhere he stopped. Along the charred edge of the platform, a blade had gutted into the floor. There was something bristling along the hilt. Bone-white, clinging through the black.

His knees struck metal. His body burned with the impact. Kneeling, calling, he pulled—he pulled. Up they came. Blurry eyes. Broken bone. Fingers shredded, blotching red. And silver, too. A silvery wrist, strung from Keith's grip like a prisoner in its noose.

He caught the eyestalk. Wrenched up. The cables churned and squirmed in his grip; they shrieked with a voice that was nearly alive. Shrilling, straining, splitting as his fingers throttled tight. He slung it aside. Its shadow cracked against a wall and it was still.

Elsewhere, something was still calling out—salt-torn and wild, a voice as hoarse as the sea. He couldn't seem to stop. His hand curled over Keith's wrist, his mouth, the bruising across his throat, and then he was fumbling at the catches of his armour, struggling to pry it loose. Frantic for a sound, a whisper of warmth, a single sign from the dark. The world had gone quiet and still he could not stop. He was pulse and tendon and fury, shouting—

Everything blurred.

He was standing in a room of crystallised light. Saltwater and the cloying sweetness of pine in his throat. A weight cooling in his arms, light as the shrapnel of a heartbeat. Hands were urging his grip to loosen, guiding him down. He knelt, and felt it slip away from him, into a chamber brimming with light.

Something spoke. He could not hear the words. There was only this: Keith's lashes, stark against his cheeks. The pained, tense bow of his mouth, caught on one last breath. The tilt of his chin as he settled back in the chamber. As if he might still, still open his eyes.

_Sorry_.

The world was quiet. His veins were empty; his throat crackled like frost. Shiro sank to the floor as the cryopod filmed over, staring voiceless into the ice.

  
  
  
  
  


"Admiral."

The room was cold. Every screen shone with the clairvoyant light of winter. Only the numbers stirred—temperature, breathing rate, blood pressure. They flickered as the body breathed inside the cryopod: written, rewritten, steady as a pulse. There was no count yet to tell him how many minutes were left to wait, or when the dreamer inside would open his eyes. Shiro kept watching.

"Admiral," the voice said again. Footsteps were singing through the floor. Three pairs, slow as fog, marching out of step. One civilian. One soldier. And—

Shiro turned back.

Across the floor, Aaklir caught his gaze, the way a child might brace a blade with bare hands. Xir face flashed above xir dark collar, blank and dark as stone. All three had come dressed in black and violet. Formal colours, or military colours—but there was no difference between the two on Vro-Seiira-Geo.

Vro-Seiira planted her feet apart. Her eyes lidded in a dusky sweep, gold drawn stark beneath the black. "Perhaps we should speak elsewhere, Admiral Shirogane. You have not rested in some time."

It was a cue; but his throat strained beneath the standard answer, as if through snow. "I'm sorry," Shiro said at last. "Whatever you have to say right now—I'm not interested."

"Even if we intend to discuss the incident which injured the Black Paladin?"

His hand stopped against the glass.

"We have investigated the site," Vro-Seiira said. In the hollowness, he understood how she had held a planet in isolation for seven years. Her voice rose through the hush like a banner. "It appears that no living accomplice was involved. The hypothesis has been put to us that that the pillar's design incorporated a specific trigger. A protective feature, installed by the Galra Empire. If we attempted to rise from the caging city in which they placed us, the pillars would trigger a form of malicious software in the closest mobile systems. These systems, taken over, would destroy the pillars, and take all of our survivors with them."

"Pretty specific hypothesis," said Shiro.

"For the moment, hypotheses are the best of what we can offer," Vro-Seiira said. "We do not think as Galra do. Give us a broken thing and we will mend it. Give us a sentence and we will carry it out. But we do not take concrete action until we have understood the situation. Fortunately, we have you."

"What about me?"

"We wondered," said Vro-Seiira, throaty as striking iron. "What do you remember of the pillar?"

Steel under his feet. An ache in his shoulders, thick as lead. Sparks lashing through every nerve. The weight of Keith in his arms, one fist still locked against his knife as they rose together. Every breath that had stuttered and strained through his teeth, as if it'd hurt to hold them back. Laughter, silicon laughter, bright and shrill and endless—

_Shakva, what are you doing?_

 _My duty, as always._

The words flooded through him like smoke. Where had he heard them? A dusty golden morning. The air worn with exhaust and metal taking shape. From the nesting tangle of the Siuegir hammocks, Shakva had leaned down to meet him, steel grace and a mask of dignified exasperation. Careful of Aaklir, as all the Siuegir were, letting Aaklir guide its hand across a screen.

The rest fell into place.

All three of them were watching him now. Vro-Seiira with her arms folded, mouth cut thin. Qival, cheeks rounded behind his soldier's mask. And Aaklir, too—staring and staring, a light without end.

"Nothing," Shiro said.

"Nothing," Vro-Seiira breathed. Her lashes sank; her shoulders rolled, restless as coals. "You surprise us."

There was something about her voice that he didn't like—a low, grinding curl, nearly scornful. Shiro bowed his head; his hand clenched over the screen. "Then your guessing skills are as bad as mine," he said. "For a while, I actually thought this was about a grudge. That someone was trying to destroy Vro-Seiira-Geo's second chance because they hated you, or someone close to you."

"And now?"

"Now," Shiro said, and laughed. "I remembered that I'm not here to solve mysteries. I didn't see anything at the pillar. And it wouldn't matter if I did."

"Admiral," said Vro-Seiira, the warning of a prime minister to a soldier.

He turned away. His fingertips tapped against the pulse count, keeping time for a dreaming heartbeat. "Tell me how long you can hold out."

"How long—"

"I've seen your systems data. Your hydroponics output won't last out the year," Shiro said, watching. "But I'm guessing you've known that for a while. Even if we found the terraforming shipment now, it'd take at least a year before you'd be able to harvest anything. How long can Vro-Seiira-Geo last without products from another planet?"

They looked at each other, the scathing gleam of knives across a mirror. "A half-turn," said Vro-Seiira.

A half-turn. Six months at best. "Let's focus on what matters to you," Shiro told the quiet. "You wanted your system to stay independent. But I'm guessing that you wouldn't turn down a new trade agreement between you and the other planets in this sector."

They'd made progress over the weeks; she didn't pretend to misunderstand him. "Even you," Vro-Seiira said, "cannot afford to make such promises. You have a duty to act within the scope of the Coalition's powers."

"Not everyone meets the qualifications to join the Coalition as soon as we make contact," Shiro said. "This is a good precedent for us. I'll make the proposal at the next summit, as the first representative of Earth. The treaty won't be just for this planet—we'll draft it to cover every habitable planet that orbits around your suns. If you decide in a year that the Siuegir or the Daq can't stay on this planet anymore, you can move them without having to worry that it's going to get your place in the treaty revoked."

"And what's the price for that?" Qival called. 

His reflection shone in the pane, blurred like a spirit seen through flame. Shiro ground his fist against it, as if he could blot out everything else—everything but the pulse of each number, rising, falling, unfaltering. "I'm not sure you understand," he said. "None of you have anything that the Coalition wants. You decided to cut yourselves off from the universe. Even now, you'd rather destroy your own resources than let someone else on the planet use them without you. You don't even have enough to trade anymore. The only reason any of you came in here today's because you wanted to sell an ally out to me."

Silence burned like ash in the air.

He'd struck the mark after all.

The story was easy to piece together once you saw the shape of it. If Shakva had acted, it'd been on Aaklir's orders. He didn't have enough history for the rest—the missing shipment, the treacherous shifts to the factory's living conditions over the months, the ways and reasons that had poisoned the Siuegir against the planet where they'd taken shelter. 

But Vro-Seiira knew. She must know by now. He'd been in her position before; there was only one reason to make this visit. She'd come to him in battle colours, flanked by her warleader and her prisoner, to forge peace in the only way that the Galra Empire had ever taught her.

_Give us a sentence and we will carry it out._

"You are still troubled today," said Vro-Seiira. "We've disturbed you. If we should speak on another day—"

"No. I'm done. Reach out to the Atlas. Come back and let me know when they'll pick me up." His fist jerked, scathing over Qival's face in the pane; the vision collapsed into fog. Shiro's mouth turned up, neat as a knife's twist. "That's my price."

It wasn't enough. They wanted more from him. A formality, a grace note, a treaty executed in shining triplicate. He owed them that. They had nowhere else to turn. He'd taken the mission, and promised to do his best. But the Atlas was stars away, light-years away, and the glass was cold beneath his hand.

What it must be like to go through life, starving, seething, thinking that there was no fate than the one thrust upon you—that you were justified in every wound and choice you made.

"I'll get you that treaty," Shiro said, head bent, voice low. "You can send your negotiation conditions to my crew on the Atlas in the next month. Any products you can get together for trade. What currencies you'll accept. Trade routes you're willing to prioritise. If we design this right, it should keep your people from starving for a while without having to open up your system. But I need you to understand this. At the end of the day, nothing that you do's ever going to change who you are." 

They weren't looking anywhere else now. Their reflections hung suspended, glittering like coals. He could close his fingers over them; he could cast them into the dust. Every breath swayed between them, light as bruising, as a body in the grip of a tightening hand.

He could tell them anything, and they'd take it.

"What you did during the war is on your hands," he said to the echoes in the glass. "You built weapons for the Galra. Your troops marched for them. Your tithes kept them safe. No matter what you do after this, the people who died because of you will never come back. The planets you left to burn are always going to carry those scars. You can do whatever you want: cooperate, rebuild, ask for forgiveness. But part of you will always be who you were under the Empire—people who'd rather watch whole planets die than let yourselves suffer."

Sound cracked behind him. A hitching breath. A broken step. Someone'd flinched back, or caught themselves halfway through lunging. What did it matter? He wasn't telling them anything that they hadn't known long ago. Qival, who'd put a price on death and laid waste to armies. Aaklir, who'd coiled xir way around the heart of a new planet and turned inside it like poison. Vro-Seiira, who'd shut away her planet after the end of the war, locking a generation away with all of their ghosts. The kind of help they wanted from him wasn't the kind they'd earned.

Shiro shuddered out, and turned back.

"But the war's over," he said. "We all have to do what we can to leave it behind."

Aaklir had stiffened. Tension rusted through the line of xir jaw; the ceremonial loops bristled along xir spine. "And, so," xe said. "What does that mean, now?"

"What do you think?"

"All of us murdered, true," Aaklir said. Xir voice was rising, spilling over, a sound like blades shrilling through stone. "Every survivor stands today because they felled another person to take their place. But some went beyond the call of the war. What about them?"

History buzzed behind the question. He couldn't feel out the shape of it; but he knew that tone. "Aaklir," Shiro said. "What exactly are you afraid of?"

" _Afraid_ ," Aaklir breathed. "You say that the Coalition will support our treaty. But how much is the Coalition going to forgive in an ally, eh? What if a planet harbours torturers? Or slave-traders? Or imperial loyalists? If that planet honours someone who once drew armies together by _raiding other planets_ —"

Xe broke off, shuddering. At the edge of his vision, Shiro caught the flash of Qival's charred, ironic smile.

There was a story here, he knew. A weight as pale as haunting, perched on the tip of his tongue. He'd promised to help them—

But it wasn't his help they wanted. He had no right to interfere on this planet except the leverage that came from being a Coalition representative.

There was nothing he could do.

Shiro turned his head. He met Aaklir's glare, its hard chitin light, and held it fast. "I made a promise that the Coalition wouldn't interfere with this system," he said, slowly. "I meant what I said. As long as all of you do what's right for all of the people of this planet—as long as you respect the Coalition's systems, so will we. No raids, no interference. That's the deal."

Silence swept through the room.

Vro-Seiira approached the cryopod. Shiro tensed; but her movements were careful. Her broad hand folded over his, an anchor against the glass. " _Vrei tules,_ " she said, as she had once before, and he felt the translation overlay stir across her voice. Something that was a little less than a war cry, but a little more than a blessing. The words that a commander might raise, unflinching, to the last banner on an empty field.

"Give my regards to the Black Paladin when he wakes," said the prime minister of Vro-Seiira-Geo. Her eyes were clear as steel.

  
  
  
  
  


He felt the Atlas before it broke the atmosphere.

The droning pulse of its engines. Its fans whirling in storms. The vast, pearled hull carving through Vro-Seiira-Geo's alien sky. Pressure jittered through his eyelids. He turned towards the window. Outside the tower, a ship was swooping towards the dunes, familiar engines pounding through the brittle winds. The Atlas called to the lands below, and Shiro held his breath tight.

He went out. 

Daylight billowed around him in veils like silt. The engines had settled by the time he caught up to the dunes; the ramps were already grinding across the landing strip. His crew came marching out in uniform, stamping down the dunes, a tide to sweep the salt-bleak land.

A few broke away from the ranks; their shadows spilled loose around him. Someone, he thought, spoke. He couldn't hear the words; but his mouth had already curved in answer. "Thanks for coming to pick me up," his voice said.

He gave orders. They were taken. Ensigns hailed the soldiers, gathered the belongings that he'd scattered through the guest-tower, wheeled a cryopod into the ship. There was a rhythm to the way they worked together; but he couldn't seem to remember it. Their movements bolted through him in cold-hot bursts. Hands clapping his shoulders. The arch of Vro-Seiira's greetings, somewhere past the crowd. The flash of Keith's body drifting by, the silhouette of a flame under ice, twisting out, fading into the dark.

"Takashi!"

He twisted back. Arms swung around him, dizzy as a whirlpool. His fingers wrenched up, clawing for the surface, but stopped before he broke skin. Dark eyes, dark hair, breathless as a memory—

"You're here," Curtis whispered. 

He'd been caught this way before, Shiro remembered. Days ago, at the edge of a festival. In the dusty corner of a city made new by sunlight. Keith's arms sure around him, drawing him down, into a smile that dazzled like summer.

He shifted; but Curtis held on. His fist dug against Shiro's spine, urgent as an undertow. "I thought I'd go crazy. You stopped calling out of nowhere and no one could explain why," he heard Curtis saying. His voice was torn, nearly gasping. "What happened out here? You have no idea what it was like, Takashi—"

There was a plea in the words, clear as a mission-call. Slowly, Shiro reached up. His hand knocked Curtis's hip, then flexed, uneasy. "I'm sorry," he said. "I meant to call. I'm fine."

Curtis shuddered. Shiro braced him up as he faltered, an empty reflex, holding Curtis steady as the light came flooding down.

What good had he done in the last few weeks? He had come to this planet for a mission, and left in his wake a wrecked city, a body caged in ice, answers without an ending. He'd left Curtis, left the Atlas—and even now with their voices rising around him, he couldn't seem to listen. His whole body ached, a cold and dreamless throb. His lungs darkened with every shrapnel breath.

But he had to stop. He couldn't be selfish now. There was nothing else left for him—nothing that he could do but this. 

Shiro shut his eyes. Memory flared beneath his eyelids. Pillars. Flowering bridges. A burst of sunlight that tangled Keith like a halo. But the cold was rising, numbing out the light. In his bones he could feel the Atlas settling: its valves, its chambers, its familiar murmuring turbines. Like a wave, this sound—a brutal force that could drown out gravity. Somewhere inside the ship, his crew was locking the cryopod into place for the flight, running through all the standard tests. He had to stop. Keith would be all right without him. He had been for years.

Slower, slower. His pulse was dropping beneath Curtis's grip, beat after beat drifting out to silence. His hands fell; his body stilled. Under the rush of the Atlas's engines, Shiro breathed out, and gave himself up to the tide.

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> and that concludes part one! taking an extra week between updates -- catch you on dec. 4.


	6. Chapter 6

  
  
  
  
  


_The voice wants to be  
a hand and the hand wants to do something  
useful. What did you really want?_ Someone  
to pass this with me. _You wanted more._  
I want what everyone wants. 

— richard siken, "unfinished duet".

  
  
  
  
  


"I see you finally got a promotion," said Sam Holt.

Shiro jolted awake. The datapad slid off his thigh; he lunged from the chair, and caught it before it struck the floor. Lights sputtered and swung around him: pale walls, black screens flurrying like wings. "What—" he said. "What?"

"Staff finally let you inside the patient's room instead of leaving you to haunt the hallway outside the ward," Sam said. He leaned past the threshold, thumbing at his glasses. "That's an accomplishment, in my book."

A sound ticked in his throat, flaking rust. Shiro breathed into a laugh. "Guess I must be doing something right," he said. "Thanks for coming down to see me."

"Oh, I should be the one thanking you," Sam said. He trailed towards the window, with all the comfortable lightness of a man who'd never forgotten spaceflight. "The medical ward's a lot closer to the engine room than your ready-room on the bridge."

"Don't encourage him, Commander," Veronica said, folded against the door. Her shoulders rolled, stiff beneath the starch, stripes brimming like horizons. "Didn't the staff clear you a week ago, Shiro? How exactly is it that _none_ of my commanding officers like sleeping in their own beds?"

"We can't all count on break-room coffee to get us through the day," Sam said. "You'll learn that when you're my age."

"Mm, spoken like a man who hasn't tried the new coffee machine." Veronica glanced over. "So? How's Keith been anyway?"

Shiro looked back. Inches away, Keith hadn't stirred. Sleep had slicked and rumpled his hair. He'd curled against the pale cot, all dusty lashes and a mouth drawn soft, weighed down by nothing heavier than dreams. "He's getting better," Shiro said. "He's getting the osproc in the morning—he was in prep for most of today. But the tests looked good. They said he should be ready to get discharged by tomorrow afternoon."

"Bet he was glad to hear that," said Sam. "I don't think I've ever seen him hold still for this long."

The words pulled from a deep well of memory; but it must've been a long time since Sam had seen Keith at work. The twist and gleam of his wrist against the chrome bar of a Garrison bike. The firework burst of his laughter, rising into desert light.

"Yeah," Shiro said, hearing in his own voice the ghosts of a faraway summer. "He's always been better at momentum."

The hush drew out. Under the murmur of iatric equipment, Veronica bent her head. With a silvery pen, she struck a new line across her datapad, stark as a banner. "Speaking of momentum," she said. "The flight plan's been logged. So now we just need to get through that ansible call with the Ghau-yei Cooperative in four hours."

The steering was almost clumsy; but Veronica had a quirk of the mouth that made all her words ring true—a kind of artlessness sharpened with faint, gleaming irony. He'd seen it play out across a dozen diplomatic round-tables, screens and flurrying quarrels flowing into a single purpose. There was no defense against it. "All right, Veronica," Shiro said, taking his cue, smiling. He'd promised not to be selfish; and here he was. "Where're we on the directive presentation?"

The answer: halfway there, and closing in. 

The new directive had risen to life at last year's diplomatic convention as a two-line amendment to the Vatta-Pritang Compact, extending its protections to all inhabited moons circling Coalition planets. Ten months later its draft had fattened up to three hundred pages, teeming with phrases like _dual-use technology_ and _value-added taxes_. Most of it said nothing about moons at all. The number of people who'd followed its growth from haiku to epic were few; the number of people who understood all of its changes were fewer still. But the directive had to pass a Coalition-wide vote before it could take effect. That meant building a story out of it: talking to the right representatives, drawing a line through its mesh-taut language about taxes and export controls, all the way back to the moon. 

Things'd be easier once Earth managed to draft terms for the intergalactic commissions of individual nations. They'd been working on it since the war's end—drafting treaties, forming councils. It was bound to launch soon. Until then, there was the Atlas, go-between for every interest on Earth that wanted to scrawl its name across the stars.

They paged through the slide deck, stopping for a few half-hearted arguments about font sizes, unintended colour signaling, and how much the adjutants could be permitted to talk about standardised product testing procedures before the Ghau-yei put them on mute. From there, as usual, the conversation flung itself outwards. They argued about upgrades to the Atlas's docking security protocols, about regulatory proposals to eliminate the practice of bounty-hunting, and the shame of being one of the universe's foremost intergalactic diplomatic vessels and only having enough budget to buy the cheapest cardboard-bitter senbei for their break-room. Sam toed the fringes of his department's budget with the undying hope of a man who dreamed of funding magnetoplasmadynamic expansions to his warp-gates. Veronica flicked over the complaints that had survived the steep bureaucracy of the Atlas's communications department, cascading them from her own datapad to Shiro's. 

It was more than he'd remembered. Paperwork rustled in his ears; it flicked under his eyelids with every blink. Still they went on. The vitafilters shifted over the hour. Sam drifted out. Rays of hollow light came shivering through the windows, and warmth traced across the floor. Keith dreamed on, gold-dappled, traced in starlight like a constellation.

A knock caught the doorframe. 

Curtis had crossed the threshold by the time they looked up. "Still here, huh," he said to Shiro, and turned. "Veronica, I've been looking for you. I had some edits to trim down the Gha-yeh presentation—"

"You and everyone else on this ship with Powerpoint privileges." Veronica flicked her pen into a spin. Her glasses shivered with unreadable light. "I locked it for a reason."

"That being?"

"The Ghau-yei like to think things through, remember? They don't like surprises, and they do a lot better with things that are written down. If any steps get taken out of the presentation, it's going to be a lot harder to convince them to support the whole treaty."

Curtis frowned. "We talked about this, Veronica," he said, bemused. "We shouldn't need to convince them. The Garrison's only backing one major proposal in the treaty. We went over it with them weeks ago. What's the point of confusing them with another call?"

"The rest of the treaty's going to affect them," Veronica said. Her gaze didn't unstitch from her screen. "Even if they don't understand all of it. It's just a few extra steps to make sure they know what they could be getting into."

"A few extra steps for you is probably a marathon for anyone else."

"What can I say? I was born to run."

"Veronica," said Curtis.

"Captain," said Veronica, precise as steel; but she turned up a smile. "Slav was already analysing risks in a related area, so I got him to work on the risk model. And Tanaka and Supelli have been working on amending the qualifications to register as a Teu-class system for a year. We've got it covered. Fifty minutes to present the proposal; an hour and forty minutes to handle their questions. It's not that big an ask."

Curtis shifted from heel to heel. His mouth parted, then pressed thin. "I'm worried about you," he said. "That's all, Veronica."

"You worry about everything."

"You know what I mean. This isn't a place we should be burning resources. The Gha-yeh have been in the Coalition for a few years now. Eventually they'll have to adjust to intergalactic standards. The Garrison can't spend hours tailoring presentations for every species we need to advise."

"I know what my limits are," Veronica said, in a voice rinsed of all tension. She swiped off her datapad and smiled at him, the tender arrogance that she reserved for family. "Don't you trust me?"

Something seemed to shift. The screens ticked through the hush; a machine gurgled by the bed. By reflex, Shiro looked down, but Keith didn't stir. 

Curtis touched his collar. His head dipped in wry surrender. "All right." A shadow brushed over Shiro's shoulder. Absent and quick, Shiro reached up; their fingertips caught in a brief, familiar comfort. "I'll leave you to it. See you at the call."

He was gone in moments; but Veronica lingered. Her eyes flicked low behind the lenses, watching shadows skitter through the brightening hall. "Veronica," Shiro said. Her pinned smile was drifting askew.

"Mm." Her shoulders bolted tight. She pinned the silvery pen behind one ear, and curled her hair with a showy flourish. "Okay. Now I'm focused."

Shiro looked at her. Over the years, Veronica had moved as if she meant to shape the Atlas around her. She'd learned all the coziest alcoves for catnaps during their red-eye shifts; she had overseen the drafting and presentation of their last three treaties. There were parts of her that were alien to him still; but he understood what she was. A puzzle-piecer, an unflinching strategist. Someone who'd looked up to the scattered stars and seen something she could solve.

"All right," he said, and left the words to hang.

Veronica pinched her glasses, suspicious. "Thanks," she said. "I've been meaning to talk to you, actually. How serious are you about negotiating a treaty for Vro-Seiira-Geo at the next summit?"

The question startled him. He turned, and felt Keith's breath curl through the sheets. "Their proposal came in this morning," said Shiro. "I've been wondering how much of that we can use."

"What do you know about Vro-Seiira-Geo's planet classification?"

He searched his memory for the classification terms. They'd voted on the categories at the Coalition summit—but the memory was a distant, brittle murmur now, all hard lights and ribbons, standing in a dark chamber as the envoys marched through a track. "They're Teu-class," Shiro said. "Right? Bol-class is for active threats. And most planets don't get classified as Lon-class unless we can't come up with any information about what they've been doing for the last twenty years."

Veronica held out her datapad.

"Vro-Seiira-Geo's been Lon-class since the beginning of the Coalition," he heard her say. Her screen was frilled with tabs, page after page of intricate designs and bruised, familiar deserts. "All the major Galra manufacturing planets got bumped into the category early on. VSG's one of the planets that never filed anything with the Coalition to get out. Not even a statement of policy. Its record looks pretty bad. It even supported slave-trading for a few decades, if you buy the rumours."

"Do we?"

She rolled her shoulders. "Supposedly their factories had an ongoing scavenger contract with one of the local satellites—this moon called Daq. After the Galra conquered a planet, they'd send the Daq in to figure out who could be relocated for factories, train them, and ship them out. Anyone who made it through Daq's training without qualifying for the Galra army got shipped to VSG."

_How much is the Coalition going to forgive in an ally? What if a planet harbours torturers? Slave-traders?_

His spine prickled with it, a wind drawn from the desert. "We're not applying to get them into the Coalition," Shiro said. "We just need to find some allies close enough to make a deal with them."

"That's not all we need," Veronica said. "You know how this works. The Coalition officially can't deal with anything that hasn't consented to its authority. It's an alliance, not a government. But we also can't bring it up in one-on-one talks with our allies without looking like we're throwing Earth's weight behind the deal."

"Isn't that exactly what we _are_ doing?"

"It's called plausible deniability," Veronica said. "Kind of like your excuse for promoting the bridge crew two years ago."

Shiro cocked his head, but he allowed himself to be derailed. "I've said it before, Veronica—that wasn't an excuse."

"Please. Out of the entire ship, you promoted your own husband, your old instructors from the Garrison, and the only officer friend you have in the communications department. It's a really good thing you're not charge of your own publicity."

"Yeah, I'm aware," Shiro said, dry as drought. "But, in my defense, you asked for the communications job." He tapped the datapad, a restless trill. "So what choice do we have now?"

For Vro-Seiira-Geo, he meant; but he'd never needed to specify a mission detail with Veronica. Her mouth prickled into a glinting smile. "We do a deep-dive presentation, flag Vro-Seiira-Geo's status as an issue, and motion for the Coalition to take formal notice," Veronica said. "And we hope someone takes the bait."

_I'll get you that treaty,_ he'd told them, standing in a winter chamber, frost rewriting the marrows of his bones, feeling every heartbeat of the years that had brought him to that point. It had been an easy promise to make in the desert, when a treaty meant nothing but a handful of signatures. Bitterness rolled in his throat like silt. "Veronica," Shiro said. "They don't have that much time."

Veronica's gaze flashed back. "I'll reassign a couple ensigns this afternoon," she said. "We can put together a profile for VSG—something that's basically a template for a trade deal. They had a lot of good products, back in the day. There has to be someone out there who'll take the deal and run with it."

"That's not enough," said Shiro. The desert burned through the backs of his eyes, all dunes and scalding, endless light. "There has to be something else we can _do._ "

She laughed. It rang like a blade striking sparks from stone. "Right," she said. "It always feels that way, doesn't it? All we'd have to do's get the Garrison to spearhead an initiative from Earth. We'd add a warp-gate, then run a pipeline of dry goods from our planet to VSG until they're finally ready to get back on their feet. And it _would_ be easy. Until one of the traders in the pipeline saw the chance to sneak some lower-quality goods across the system without running it through customs. Until a plenipote turns us into a talking point for their own cause— _trust the home of the paladins to believe it's above the law_. Until the Coalition sanctions us for trading with a Lon-class planet without authorisation. After all, we haven't let anyone else do it so far."

In the prisming light, it was impossible not to look at her. The jut of her dark brows, her high collar prickling askew, jaw drawn with the light of something unspeakable. All these years, and she had never once slowed down. 

"We built this system," Veronica said, with crooked cheer. "Now we have to live with it."

Shiro's grip dug against the pale drift of the bed. There were arguments to be made about that; but he understood enough about tactics to know that he could not argue with his own analyst. He couldn't think—and memory stirred, veiling the backs of his eyelids. Sitting, just so, in the Black Lion's cockpit. Veins stammering with ice. His hands locked over the controls. Seeing through his lashes system reports idling across the windshields, consoles woven with pulsar lights. He had held his place for an hour: not moving, not pressing down.

It wasn't his memory. It was.

Shiro pressed a knuckle between his brows. He breathed—waited, and breathed.

Heartbeats passed. Starlight flashed through the window, and he sank back in the chair. At the fringes of his vision, he could see Veronica still leaning against the wall, head bent to her datapad in the glossy silence of a woman who saw nothing out of the ordinary.

But then, Veronica knew what it was like to be tired.

Shiro shifted. "All right," he said, softer, and reached out for the datapad. "Let's get to work."

  
  
  
  
  


Veronica left first. The Atlas was always in motion; its crew could not be less. There were calls from Earth to bridge, outbound transfer applications to review, scout-ships circling through their lidded windows, waiting for the signals from the bridge that would allow them to land. He could have gone with her; but the day was still early. It was easier to work in the quiet of the ward. Shiro lingered under the gleaming panel of diagnostic screens, paging through the days that he'd missed.

The decklogs were neat as they'd always been, reports plodding down from every department. Legislative summaries from the powers and principalities of Earth, signing off on what could be entered into their treaties as they moved foward. Junior officer assessments from the MFE squadron leaders. The standard restock authorisations and budget tick-marks from admin. Three weeks ago, the Atlas had been called to assist in the final stages of the census for the Ghau-yei Cooperative. A week after that, emissaries of the Atlas had flown out to Sachronfa to witness the signing of three construction contracts, which would set out the groundwork for warptech infrastructure in their sector.

Paragraph after paragraph. They moved through his memory like a tangle of wire frames. He knew the name Sachronfa. It had a weight on his tongue, a shadow. He must have spoken it before, must have approved some motion or decorated a ceremony. But no real memory came with the thought. He couldn't remember its sunlight or gravity, the accents of its people, the peace they'd brought. 

He couldn't remember.

His arm prickled. The ward vents were stirring again, a cycle of droning tides. If that didn't wake Keith, nothing would. He reached out; his fingers draped over Keith's. "Well, you heard Veronica," said Shiro. "I've got that call today—but I'll be back as soon as I can. The osproc always sounds a lot worse than it is. You'll be fine."

Only silence answered him. Silence, and the mending march of Keith's pulse in his fingertips, relentless even in dreams. 

"Get some rest," Shiro said at last.

He went out.

Three weeks hadn't been long enough to forget the Atlas; but the distance made it strange again. Out of habit, Shiro steered himself into the route that he used on inspection days. He passed through hallways, across floors as pale as shorelines, taking the long way up to the bridge. Five years had touched the Atlas lightly. Its lamps rose like hearth-fires as he passed, turbines singing through his bones in deep, belling notes. Its walls glowed like a new forging. The wings that had opened the stars back up to him; the lights that had seen him through the end of the war.

He'd thought it was strange once, long ago: the flensing hum of the Atlas's voice, nothing like a lion's roar. He remembered that.

He was at the third floor when he felt the shadow trailing after him.

He drifted in and out of rooms without pattern, trailing through restricted workspaces and battle-stations. The shadow matched every step. It pricked and fumed at the corners of his eyes. It blurred the curve of each work-station, and vanished when he looked back. He knew it somehow, its haunting malice through his spine, its static and familiar silhouette—

Deliberately Shiro headed for an empty corner, moving in strides. In the dark, he turned and doubled back. His arm curved out, whistling; his fingers hooked into muscle and bone. Something yelped, and he hauled it forward.

" _Got_ you," Shiro said—then stopped.

Ezor grinned down at him. In a year, she seemed to have grown, impossibly, bigger. Her boot thudded against the wall; her shoulders bowed with thickening intent. The long, banded tail rolled and coiled from her head in reptilian strokes. It lashed out. His fist gnashed shut as it roped over his throat. He wrenched hard, and she shrilled in half-pained delight.

"Ezor," Shiro said, harsh as smoke. "I don’t have time to play games with you today."

"Please. I _saw_ you. You're whole and healthy and you're just walking around doing nothing!" Her weight swung. He lunged; but Ezor swept low, skidding herself between his legs and across the floor in a reckless spill. Down the hall she whirled, tail whipping in dancer's circles, hands flung high as celebration. "Ooh, you're a lot slower than he said you'd be!"

In a heartbeat, he crushed the space between them. His hand fanned across the wings of her collarbone, caging her back against the wall. "If I told you that you couldn't get up until you came up with an exact quote," Shiro said, watching her sway. "How long do you think you'd be stuck here?"

Ezor looked at him, heaving, mirror-eyed, every fleck and scale unreadable. He had known offworlders who looked close to human. A shift in colour, a slant of bone. But there was nothing knowable about Ezor's face up close: her venom-flared stripes, her lipless, shark-wide mouth, the dart and hunting stroke of her eyes moving to and fro—

Her shoulders ground against the wall. She hefted herself up, kneeing him in the thigh; but his arm jutted up, pinning her throat back again. "You're," she coughed. "Really no fun at all, _ugh_. No wonder Keith's always—"

His weight shifted. Ezor's throat strained, tendons roping against his palm. "I don't remember," Shiro said, with the harmonics of an ion engine, "giving you permission to board my ship."

"You should be keeping closer track!" Ezor panted. She was still smiling, wide as a mirage. "Zethrid flew us out here—soon as we heard what happened to Keith. The guys in charge didn't even ask us what we wanted when we showed up. People're so _nice_ now that the war's finished—"

The turbines sang in warning.

Shiro whipped back. Steel went skidding over his shoulder, and struck through the wall. A blade shuddered in the ringing light, fingers away from Ezor's cheek.

Steps away, a figure tensed in her armour. "I," said Acxa. Her jaw rolled, grinding down her startlement. "You have my apologies," she said to Shiro. "I wasn't aiming for you."

"You threw a _knife_ ," said Shiro.

"Oh, Acxa doesn't say hello like humans do," said Ezor; the name, on her tongue, was a drawling song. Her fingers swayed along the bar of his arm like petals. "Don't be rude. Hi Acxa. I thought you were gonna be down there guarding Keith for the next three years."

"Ezor," Acxa said. Her voice carved the hall. "Zethrid needs us. Now."

Ezor stilled. They looked at each other. Something passed through the air, stark as comet-fire.

He felt Ezor's turn before it began. Her fist came whistling up for his head. Shiro swung away, and she arched. Her feet caught against his calves, and hooked in hard, twisting. They went tumbling together. In heartbeats, Ezor eeled loose from his arms. Her steps slithered across the floor; her elbow struck Acxa's shoulder, bracing herself against it. "Thanks for the practice!" Ezor called with a gaudy wave. "It's always nice seeing you, now that you're not brainwashed. And, you know, _less_ creepy? But we've got places to be right now—Acxa doesn't make this face unless it really matters."

Shiro stared.

Corner to wall to light. He'd been moving on instinct since he'd felt the shadow behind him. This was nonsense, like a scene carved out from another world; it had nothing to do with the wave-steady flow of the Atlas. Ezor had jumped him at a whim; Acxa had nearly cut her down. The only reason they'd stopped was because of something that mattered more.

His nerves tightened.

The floor flickered beneath his steps like ocean-silt settling. He'd crossed their shadows by the time they turned. Ezor started, but a handful of minutes had been enough to get the measure of her. She lashed at him, and he turned and caught her half-hearted fist. His grip clamped down.

Nothing they were doing made sense; but Keith knew them, and they'd flown out to the Atlas for him.

"Tell me what's happening," Shiro said. "I want to help."

  
  
  
  
  


But it was easier to see it.

Acxa brought them to the cafeteria doors. A plate struck the threshold as their shadows crossed it. Porcelain shards shrilled along the floor. Across the cafeteria, all movement had stopped. The crew stood like a vision under ice, scattered and watching as a soldier turned in circles on a table.

Zethrid's head drew up. Her face lit like a knife.

She twisted back. Seen from the side, she might have been a piece of artillery, gaunt as gunmetal, her smile drawn wide enough to bleed. "What's the _matter_ with this place?" Zethrid called, a roar like an army formation's. "Aren't you the best that Earth had to offer?"

"Honestly," said Veronica. "I have no idea what you're trying to prove."

She had drawn herself up from the farthest cluster of tables. There was no fear in her rumpled sleeves or the sling of her jaw. 

At his shoulder, Acxa shifted her weight like a sniper. He couldn't seem to move.

"So what good are you, you little calculator?" Zethrid jumped down. Her impact thundered, blotting out sound as she crossed the floor. "How many planets were waiting to dock with you today? Must be fun, knowing that there's nothing they can do until you tell them to move. Knowing the universe went from begging at the Empire's feet to begging at yours."

"Our resources have limits," Veronica said. "We're doing our best with what we have."

Zethrid jeered. "Resources? Earth saved the universe with a sliver of everything you hold now." She leaned down, and Veronica lifted her chin, unflinching. "How much more do you need to build your peace? How many sacrifices? _When will you be strong enough?_ "

"Zethrid," Veronica said again, and Zethrid jolted. Her fangs gnashed, jagged as cyanide, their faces suspended by inches. "If you want to talk, we can talk. But no one can give you what you're looking for until you say what that is."

"What I want," Zethrid breathed, "is some _progress_. Years since the death of the Emperor, the death of Voltron, and none of you have even learned how to keep yourselves safe. Look at this!" She gestured. An MSPR envoy froze in place, caught halfway around the table; with whipcord fury, Zethrid tore another plate off the table and slung it at her shadow. Plate and envoy tumbled in opposite directions. "What have you been doing with all this time besides getting softer, weaker, spoiled? Look at you! All of you, rotting under the weight of your brand-new empire!"

Her echoes cracked from wall to wall. Ezor swayed on her heels. Her expression faded—faraway, dreaming. She melted into the air.

In the silence, only Veronica moved. Her fist curled along her own throat, shivering. "I'm sorry that we let Keith get hurt," she said.

Something shifted in Zethrid's face, volcanic. Her snarl shattered the light. He remembered this moment, this exhausted, empty terror. It was then; it was now. He was burning alive in the cabin of a scout-ship, darkness turned radiant with alarms. His temples pounded; his limbs shook. Stone-blooded, granite woven through his nerves and tendons. Half a world away, on the cliff of a nightmare, Zethrid was plunging a boy into the air. Her knuckles molten across his bruising throat, her claws biting into skin, choking the stars out of him—

The distance crumbled.

He was across the cafeteria. The volcano was gone. Slow and grinding, Zethrid looked back to the metal hand planted against her nape, boiling white.

"Zethrid," Ezor said. All at once she came spilling into view, a sleek, striped silhouette at the corner of his eye. Her tail noosed around Zethrid's neck. "Take it down, okay? We won't get paid for a body count in here."

Zethrid bared her teeth; but the defiance had been scorched out of her. Her head swung low. She thudded to her knees. "Right," she said, all fangs and coarse, crumpled light. "I surrender."

He saw each word taking shape, the bow of her throat gone soft beneath Ezor's leash. But there was fire in his fingertips, soot and a ship's fuming smoke; his veins crackled with the cadence of light and laserfire. The silence had broken. His crew was moving again. Their steps shivered through him, wounded, gun-shy. His ship had given Zethrid permission to dock; his crew had seen her out to the heart of the Atlas, and she'd answered them with—

"Shiro," Acxa said, in a tone he nearly knew.

His hands went cold, lightless. Shiro met her eyes, and held them.

"You should—" Acxa's shoulders bristled with a tension that he couldn't name. "Tend to your crew."

"Why? So that Zethrid can knock them down again?"

Her head turned, neat as ivory. "We recognise the Atlas's authority," Acxa said. "We submit to its judgment. You have my oath on my blade that we won't cause any other trouble. But your crew deserves your attention for now. Please."

_Please_.

His gaze trailed hers across the floor. 

Shiro twisted away. "Veronica," he called. Veronica's head snapped up, military attention strung into a reflex. At once Shiro slowed. His hands drifted up, footsteps charring into silence. "It's just me. Are you all right?"

Veronica rose. Her smile slipped, prickling the corners of her mouth like shrapnel. "I'm," she said, gripping the table. "Uh—"

Silhouettes prickled at the edges of his vision. Shiro ignored them. His hand curved under Veronica's elbow, steering her into a quiet corner. "Tell me when the incident started," he said.

It was easier for Veronica to deal with facts in a crisis. She breathed out. "Not that long ago," she said. "I'd say ... probably ten minutes. She was looking for me when she came in."

"Why?"

"Oh, you know there's always a backlog for docking clearance—and we're pretty overwhelmed right now. Apparently they were in orbit for almost a day. I think she blamed me for that. And she kept getting angrier." She clasped her arms; her eyes drifted back to Zethrid's shadow. "You know, I forget sometimes."

"Forget?"

"How the Atlas looks to people who don't live here."

Against all instincts, Shiro looked back. Zethrid was still on her knees, ears folding as Ezor bowed over her, crooning insults into the crown of her head. Light curled across a scar on her shoulderplate, a shining patchwork fix, jagged as a child's stitches. It looked new.

_Rotting under the weight of your brand-new empire_.

The Blade of Marmora had been a paramilitary organisation before the Coalition's rise. Every member of the Coalition recognised its existence, and praised the humanitarian roots of its work; but its alliances were not the Coalition's alliances, and its missions were never sanctioned by any official statements. Oversight, he'd understood, wouldn't suit an organisation dominated by Galra soldiers—the universe's only surviving rebellion against the Empire before Voltron. 

The Blades' work made peace possible; but they didn't belong to it.

Shiro turned his head. "Can you handle the situation in here?"

"The situation." Veronica's lips drew into a glassy smile. "That's so military."

"If you've got another word for this, I could use it right now."

Zethrid had infiltrated a restricted area on the Atlas. She'd held members of its crew captive for a drawn-out wait before she'd been brought down by force. There had been no danger in the moment; every officer on the Atlas understood what the Blades did, and what Zethrid's temper was worth. But that didn't change what the story could become. If someone didn't clarify what they'd witnessed, and what they'd restrained.

"Go," Veronica said, light and easy. "Grab them and head out. Someone's going to have to chaperone them if they're going to find Keith."

On instinct, Shiro clasped her shoulder. Veronica stiffened, tendons straining like wire. "Take it easy, Veronica," he said, and let go. 

There was only one favour that he could do for her, and so he did. Shiro left her at the table, feeling the slow, gathering rush as his crew-members drifted towards her, one by one, pebbles in a tide.

Acxa was still looking for him. Her hand clung to Zethrid's shoulder, a guarding weight, as he closed in. 

"All right," Shiro said. "Time to see the person you came for."

  
  
  
  
  


He guided them down to the medical floor. They fell into line after him without a word, marching down like enemy soldiers, eyes caught on some alien, unreachable horizon.

The hallways emptied out as they went. No one spoke, which was a relief. He needed a better understanding of Zethrid, but there was no leverage for it. The end of the war had not changed her as far as he could see. Zethrid loomed through every room she entered, and dressed to loom larger still. She spoke as little as she could to people outside her unit, except for threats or jeers. She liked strength, risks, and service. He'd seen her with Keith before: in the crowd on ceremony days, one heavy arm bent around Ezor's waist, her other wrist hooked over Keith's shoulder, roaring with laughter as his brows ticked together.

_I forget, sometimes, how the Atlas looks to people who don't live here._

The bladed curves of the Atlas's service hallways softened into the medical ward's glossy tilework. Shiro beckoned them to the door. They went in.

Some cold draft must have brushed through after he left. In the hospital bed, Keith had shifted a little, curled into himself. His hair coiled against his cheek; his breathing had the lilt of a secret.

The sight seemed to undo them. Ezor tugged herself loose, snaking her way over to perch on the bed's railing. Acxa sank into Shiro's chair. There was a hard, wordless clarity about her face, shining raw as fever.

Shiro looked away, and found Zethrid looking at him. For a moment, the cafeteria walls flickered behind his eyelids: shrapnel, crumbs, and the unyielding set of Veronica's shoulders, carrying the Garrison's colours like a banner.

"Something you want to say?" said Shiro.

Zethrid shifted. "Not to you."

Her steps were soundless as she forged her way over to the bed. Her thick fingers closed over Keith's wrist as it swayed from the mattress; she tucked it under the blankets with delicate, monstrous control.

He had been on Vro-Seiira-Geo with Keith. He'd seen him fall—had carried him into the factory's only cryochamber, watched all of his grime and bruising fading into ice. He hadn't thought of it before as an advantage—that he knew what had happened to Keith, and all the steps that'd been taken to see him to safety.

"He's going to be fine," Shiro said in a rush, delicate as a flood. "He sustained some broken bones and a few burns when he took down the target on the last mission. He's scheduled for an osproc tomorrow—it speeds up the bone-healing process. They gave him something today to get him ready. But he'll be awake tomorrow. Once that's over, he should be ready for discharge."

They received this without stirring. Ezor stooped over the bed, poking Keith's cheek. "Hm. Which bones?"

"If you ruin their preparations," Acxa said, "we'll need to extend our stay here."

"I'm just _asking_ , Acxa. Asking questions doesn't ruin things."

Shiro looked at them. Acxa's steadiness; Zethrid's watchman stare; the way Ezor puffed her cheeks, hands pinched in her sulking lap. "Has Keith ever gotten this hurt on a mission before?"

A coarse laugh rattled the room. Zethrid rolled a thumb behind the hinge of her jaw. Bone clicked, and she grunted in satisfaction. She folded herself against the foot of Keith's bed. A card-holo sprang up. "You don't know him at all," she said.

"Keith may be dumb, but he's cunning-dumb," Ezor said. The railing chimed against one heel; her tail swiped a stray lock from his eyes. "Did he ever tell you about the time he had to wait out an avalanche for three quintants until we could dig him out?"

"How—" The thought gouged at his throat, a hole that was nearly visceral. "What happened to the wolf?"

"The wolf was with us," Acxa said. She'd settled into the pose of a guard: head high, boots drawn apart, ready to rise. "We had more territory to cover if we were going to put down the rebellion. He knew that his friend couldn't afford to travel for both of our parts."

"He was so grumpy when we finally found him," Ezor said, cheerful. "We had the ship's heating cranked up for a phoeb before he finally slept through a whole night—"

"He's your _friend_ ," Shiro said.

They looked at him, three faces in a startled constellation. Acxa twitched her shoulders. "He's yours, too," she said. "Friendship doesn't change the requirements of a mission. It was necessary, and we found him before he reached his limits."

It was as if he were shouting through a transmission, half of every sound lost to static and mistranslation. "The point of a mission's to recover as much as we can while hurting your agents as little as possible."

"The point of a mission," said Acxa, tight and quick, "is to see it through. Keith understands that. Has he ever told you otherwise?"

Shiro stared. He could have shouted at her for that—Acxa, and the rest of them, stretching their talons and memories over Keith as if he had only ever belonged to them. Keith understood the needs of a mission; but he knew, he must know, that there were exceptions too. Images rose and fell between his ribs. Keith alone in the cockpit of an alien flyer, driving towards a firecracked planet. Across the floor of a ruined lab, a blade in each hand, under a sky saturated with collapsing stars. Clinging to the cables of a shattering tower, in a city stripped of all its sunlight over centuries.

Keith breathed in, quick and shuddering. Several things happened at once.

A familiar blue shadow lit at the end of the mattress, a deliberate cloudburst, as Zethrid won her holo-game. She bolted to her feet, triumphant, and the wolf shied from her, padding along the sheets as Ezor's gaze snapped down. The rest blurred into chaos. Acxa sprang up, toppling the chair. There was shouting as Ezor looped an arm around the wolf and Zethrid thumped a bedpost in startlement. Moving together like planets caught in the same inexorable gravity.

"That's enough," Acxa called as Ezor cooed and Zethrid howled; but she was smiling. Starlight came dazzling through the glass, an infinite cascade. In the flooding light, Shiro felt the slow crack of time between all that he'd known and all that he'd failed to see. "We've waited this long. Let him sleep."

  
  
  
  
  


It was afternoon by the time Keith woke.

Light spilled into lushness across the silvery bedframes, the stiff, formal holoprints that they'd heaped on the nightstand. The walls were flushed with the fever of saltwater and static. Keith shuddered. His head dipped under the heavy light. His shoulders rolled, each like a sword-hilt; his lips parted in a flicker of heat. "Shiro," he breathed.

From his chair, Shiro laughed. "Finally," he said. "Thought I'd never see you sit up again."

He'd meant it as a joke, but Keith tensed. He pushed himself up with rusty intent. "How long—have you been in here?"

That struck him: a little pang lacing down his throat. "Not that long," said Shiro. "How're you feeling?"

Bemused, Keith bent to a side. He traced his ribs, a movement as spare as calligraphy. "Good," he said. "I didn't think the Garrison was making cryotech too."

His voice was still raw, and there was a flinch in the way his fingers drew across skin; but it was Keith, measured touches and his gaze steady as a polestar. Something in Shiro's chest eased with the sight. "Not exactly cryotech," he said. "So keep taking it easy. But you'd be surprised at how much progress we've made in a few years."

"Not really," said Keith. "You're good at making things happen."

"I don't know what you're thinking, Keith, but I don't have the kind of power to revolutionise the medtech industry by myself."

"Don't you?"

Of all the bruising miracles that made up Keith, this might have been the worst: that he could take any idea, however rootless, however off-kilter, and make it ring true. "If I've made anything happen in the last couple years, it's because of my crew," Shiro said. "Sam and Veronica pretty much run the admin side of things. Curtis's my second officer—he signs off on most of the bridge decisions when I'm not available. And whenever a representative shows up to question the decisions of our whippersnapper crew, Iverson's always ready to yell for a few hours until they calm down. I think that might be the only time he actually enjoys being first officer." He smiled. Under his heels, the Atlas was dreaming: a tidal choir, all fans and shivering wires, thrumming with a deepwater clarity that could swallow him whole. "Honestly—I couldn't have made it this far without them."

"That's just the bureaucratic stuff. I know there's more to being a Coalition representative than taking calls and signing treaties."

"Then you really haven't learned enough about politics," Shiro said. "Keep it that way. You've got some get-well cards, by the way."

It was a good distraction. The stack flashed through the reddening shadows. Shiro guided its clutter from the side-table into Keith's squinting reach. "Do you have a gift shop on board or something?" said Keith.

"What?"

"Zethrid and Ezor try to steal something from every planet we land on," said Keith. Card by card, he began to flick through the stack. Sequins flickered, and ink, and filmy holograms, each squared into a tower by his thigh. "They call them hunting trophies."

"Wow," said Shiro, looking at a card armoured in glitter. "You picked up some fearsome hunters."

Keith grimaced. The hook of his mouth needed no translation. 

But he stopped at the last card—a folded holoprint scrawled over with dense black paragraphs, splotched with galaxy static. Stamped across the border was a string of spatial coordinates, clean as a mission header.

"That one's a transcript," Shiro said, quieter. "Aaklir called this morning."

"Yeah," said Keith. "I figured."

He balled the holoprint into a fist; but his grip slackened, shoulders shivering, as he twisted towards the window. Folds rasped between his knuckles, bristling.

Shiro didn't speak. Even after the desert, there were stories in Keith that he'd never touched. What those first days had been like, seventeen years old and alone in his dad's driftwood cabin. If he dreamt, still, of the Black Lion calling across galaxies: her echoes like meteors, lighting him down through his bones. The last thing he'd seen on that wild, nameless planet that had steered him out of the system, hurtling after the Siuegir's ship.

With Keith, the question was never the point. All he ever needed was space.

"For what it's worth," Shiro said. "I don't think xe meant for anyone to get hurt."

Silence flickered between them, thin as a paper flame.

"Right," said Keith. He smoothed out the holoprint, and set it aside with the cards. "Did they find the shipment?"

He took the hint. "Not as far as I know. Their treaty proposal was pretty barebones. Didn't look like they were about to start farming." Vro-Seiira's cabinet must have taken the brunt of the work. The draft had been two pages of sparse and narrow prose, prickling all over with the kind of barbed subprovisions which could have only grown from decades of bureaucracy. But they hadn't asked for much: hydroponic components, nutrient packs, a thousand kilograms of food-grade materials per square kilometer of trading territory. Shiro rubbed his nape. "But I—might have put them on edge before I left."

"What," said Keith. He turned the question over. "How?"

"They know the Coalition's watching them now," Shiro said. It was the only answer he could give to a man still sitting in an infirmary bed. "Our founding charter has some pretty broad language covering the misdirection of food supplies for personal advantages. Even if they wanted to give the shipment back, they'd need a good story to make sure the Siuegir wouldn't get penalised under that section."

"Is Vro-Seiira-Geo joining the Coalition?"

Ice welled in his spine—hollow lights and a raw, merciless voice, ringing through a wintry chamber. "No," said Shiro, too quick. He breathed in. "As far as I know, they haven't changed their mind about that. I tried to take some of the pressure off of them—I forwarded a couple of the standard announcements about how busy the Coalition's going to be, coming up to the summit."

"Too busy to watch them."

"Exactly. In theory, they should know we're telling them that we won't start any oversight processes for Vro-Seiira-Geo until after they've got a contract. I just—get the feeling they're not going to trust anything we say."

Keith sank back onto his pillow. "I still don't get why Aaklir took the shipment." He said it as if the idea were an old haunt, unsettling as an echo. "Xe's not leaving Vro-Seiira-Geo. What's the point of starving out the whole planet?"

_You'd rather destroy your own resources than let someone else on the planet use them without you. The only reason any of you came in here today's because you wanted to sell an ally out to me._

He had said it once, days ago, and meant it with all the shadows that his voice could cast. The war was over, and his bayard was gone. Judgment was his last weapon now; not his own, but the judgment of the Atlas—the best part of him that had been left behind. He hadn't been able to protect Keith; but he could make them pay for that. He could make them fear, burn them all in nightmares of enemy ships and a new war. He'd wanted to.

But it was a relief to sit in the melting sunlight, and forget, for a moment, what he'd wished on Vro-Seiira-Geo, back when his hands pressed over Keith's reachless, dreaming eyes. "Your guess is as good as mine," Shiro said, husky and low. "What do you know about Aaklir's relationship with Qival?"

Keith frowned. "What relationship? Qival was working from Vro-Seiira-Geo for most of the war. He didn't meet Aaklir until last year." His fists knuckled, rolling through a thought. "I know that they never really had to deal with each other before. Taking the pillars down was probably the first project they handled together."

"Maybe xe was trying to frame him."

"That wouldn't make sense," Keith said. "Vro-Seiira knew Qival before the war even started. She wouldn't stop trusting him without a good reason."

Of course she could. People changed; trust could be lost with the flip of a heartbeat. But there was no failure, no cruelty, no betrayal that would ever be sharp enough to carve that lesson into Keith. "I guess it doesn't matter now," said Shiro. "The next Coalition summit's in two weeks. We'll get Vro-Seiira-Geo's conditions into a trade proposal draft and shop it around. A contract's a lot more reliable than a harvest."

"Sounds like a good time."

He'd cast out the subject like a baited hook, an open hand; it was a relief to feel Keith take it. "I know," Shiro breathed, and tried a smile. "Three weeks of cramming into small rooms with a bunch of experts who all know a lot more about legalese and financial projections than I do, and trying to keep them from murdering each other. Almost makes me miss the actual battles."

"No matter what you do," Keith said softly, "you can't make saving the universe sound like a bad thing."

The words brimmed in his veins like adrenaline, like a lion's beacon—a call from a long-lost year. Shiro cocked his head. "Want to come?"

Keith looked at him, then to the window. His profile burned with bonfire clarity through the sinking light. "I don't think I can, Shiro."

"Why not? I know you don't like bureaucracy, but the summit puts a lot of weight on neutral third-party evidence. Testifying about what happened could do a lot for Vro-Seiira-Geo."

"Do you know what the Blade of Marmora does?"

His grip flexed against the arms of the chair—an uneasy anchor, a habit he'd learned and never lost. He had called Krolia for a dozen things over the years. Padding out the honour-guards of vulnerable plenipotes; speaking to planets about the advantages of different trade routes; retrieving data from zones still flagged as Lon-class. "It does a little of everything, from what I hear," Shiro said. "But its main focus these days is operating as a humanitarian organisation built on supply infrastructure."

"I'm not even sure what that means," said Keith.

"Keith." Memory whirled in his ears. The drawl of an alien engine under Keith's stainless steering; the wardrum of his voice, reciting a military lock-code as if he'd done it a hundred times before. How Zethrid had laughed, smoky with contempt: _you don't know him at all._

He said, "You're just delivering supplies, right?"

"Yeah." Keith bit the word out, diamond-edged. "We deliver supplies. We fly through territory that hasn't been vetted by the Coalition, and we make sure everyone we pass over's got enough to survive. There's a lot of planets out there that haven't given up their status as Galra allies. Sometimes they can't prove it up to the Coalition's standards; sometimes they just don't want to give up their ability to travel to non-Coalition systems. The Blades take people from those planets, and we fly them out to the places that'll let them stay without putting them through a background check."

"Okay," Shiro said. His breath swayed in his throat; he swallowed against its. "That's not technically illegal."

"Good thing the Coalition's used to technicalities."

They'd gone astray somewhere. Keith's expression had stripped blank—jaw set, all the stars in his eyes turning inward. It mattered to Keith, Shiro thought, that he know this. There was no such thing as a confession for its own sake. Every truth came with its own edge and point. 

"Has Krolia or Kolivan ever talked to anyone in the Coalition about these missions?" he said.

Keith stiffened. "We don't answer to the Coalition."

"Right," said Shiro. "And asking questions is one step below asking for permission." 

The pieces were coming together like points in a syzygy. He had known the boundaries that the Coalition drew around the Blade of Marmora. He hadn't thought of the hands which must be pressed along the other side of it, holding every line in place. Ten thousand years was a little infinity. There must have been days, decades, centuries when the Blades had looked into a universe of ash and thought that the war was over.

They'd won. Zarkon was dead; Honerva was gone; the Galra Empire had dissolved again into stars and systems. But a victory was not an ending.

"All right," Shiro said. "So don't testify. But I'd still—appreciate it if you could stick around for a few weeks while we're drafting the trade proposal."

That knocked Keith off-guard. His shoulders dropped, slackening; his mouth pinched in an irresistible flush. "Uh," he said. "You've seen my mission reports, right?"

Practical, but not sensible—that was Keith in a nutshell. "I promise I'm not going to make you write anything," Shiro said. "But you're the only person in the ship who has actual experience with the Siuegir, and the only other person who's seen the situation on the planet. The Atlas could use your perspective if we're going to get this deal together in time."

Somehow he'd steered his way to a safe harbour. Keith shifted; his fingers skimmed across the sheets, a lean and feverish line, a restlessness that he knew down to his marrows. "Sure you're not just saying it to get me to stick around?"

He couldn't shut his eyes; so he smiled. "Well," Shiro said. "I _have_ missed you. And besides, I'd hate for you to miss the show."

"What," said Keith, bemused and warm. He craned up, and Shiro caught his hand to steady him. "What show?"

Shiro canted his head to the windowpane, the vitafilters turned rich as rubies, fuming across a landscape dressed in seasonal colours. "We're heading back to Earth for servicing," he said. There was a giddiness between his ribs, all his thoughts rising with the fever of a long-lost summer. "We'll be docking in about half an hour. Should be just in time to catch the sunset. Just like old times."

Keith breathed in. "Okay," he said at last. "That sounds good."

In the stillness, their fingers tightened, heartbeats caged in the curl of hand under hand.

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a little late, mea culpa. for symmetry's sake, the next chapter will be posted eight days from now instead of the scheduled five.


	7. Chapter 7

  
  
  
  
  


Keith took them out to the desert.

His ride, at Keith's speed. Shiro signed out supplies with a prototype from the warehouse—a slim, brassy patrolcycle, its frame drawn in Garrison colours. Keith settled onto its saddle in an easy, conquering slide, clasping the handlebars as his thighs drew across steel.

They rode through town, passing holoscreens and grimy fly-lights. Glass winked along neon. Buildings brimmed with sidelong reflections all the way down the road. The street-signs glowed, traced with the dozen new languages that had settled across the planet. Gold flooded the air as they broke into open terrain, and then they were flying, flying across the dunes as the cityscape slipped into dust.

Keith drove with the same clean, ribboning speed that he used in space. The patrolcycle steered around thorn-trees and broken boulders. The winds grew balmy with the sweetness of creosote bushes. They clipped a sand drift, and particles flurried in a little tempest across the cycle's shielding. Keith laughed through the rush. They flew on: across the scrublands and towards the weathered horizon.

They dismounted at the cliffs. The sun had struck the plains below. Red lanced across the dusk in rays, flushing the fringes of the rising night. 

Keith knelt by the cycle and began to unpack. A puff rocked the dust. Shiro started; but only the wolf came winding out of the cloud, tail flickering and nose pricked up. Keith grimaced. "Told you not to pick the beef jerky," he said.

Shiro crouched. "Hey there," he said, laughing as he beckoned. "Did you pick up some psychic powers since the last time I saw you?"

"Meat-sensing powers, maybe," Keith said as the wolf investigated Shiro's fingers, and condescended to be rubbed under the chin. "Still hasn't gotten used to ration-packs."

"That's fair," Shiro said. "No one deserves to live on ration-packs."

They settled along the cliff. Keith stripped the wrapping from blades of jerky, passing them to the wolf; both watched as Shiro sifted through the new tiers of messages on his datapad. "Did something happen on the ship?"

"Nothing too big." One by one, he doused his alerts, paging through star-maps and telemetry, all the scattered heartbeats of the Atlas's day. "Sam's telling me that he's setting up a temporary barrier around the engine room. Keycard access only."

Keith frowned. He glanced at the wolf, who peered back with lamp-eyed interest. "Can you tell them not to mess around on the lower floors of the ship? Public floors only."

The wolf's head tilted. A wind stirred the cottontop reeds, and then there were only two shadows on the cliff.

Shiro leaned back. "If you're plotting against me, I'd like to point out a big flaw in the security on your side."

Keith snorted. "You _are_ my side."

"So why am I getting the feeling that the Atlas's putting up wards against your people?"

They looked at each other, laughter silvering the air like film static. Keith broke first. He scrubbed through his hair. "Ezor and Zethrid don't like getting out of practice," he said. "They always try to find a side-mission when we're going to be planetside for a while."

"Hence the cards," Shiro said, and Keith nodded.

"I guess Veronica's been watching them for a while. This morning, she told them that she'd set up stealth training for them, if they could handle it." 

"Stealth training."

"If they can steal three of the Atlas's biggest assets before we leave, they get some kind of prize." Keith swept a dry look at the patrolcycle, its trunkbox gaping empty. "I'm pretty sure they're just using it an excuse not to run inventory on the cargo they picked up on the last mission."

There was an ease to his voice, a lightness that could be felt but not understood. Keith had never been half so casual with Voltron's missions, or the Garrison's. But that had been a different time. He had known how to serve as the Black Paladin, and he had done his duty; but given time, given a chance, this was the team and the purpose that he'd chosen for himself.

"If you need help inspiring your crew to do their work," Shiro said, "I'm sure I can give you some pointers."

Keith looked at him, dead-eyed. He tossed a jerky stick, and Shiro snapped it out of the air.

The skies dimmed. Clouds drew a milky crown across the sun. Through the hush, he could feel Keith beside him, wrist swaying over a knee, warmth glowing in the lean stretch of his thigh. The last murmur of sunlight trailing gold along his jaw, his lashes, the hot gleam between his collarbones. 

"Back when we started flying together," Keith said, jarring him. "I spent most of the funds we got from the Blades on ration-packs. I stuffed one hold full of them. I figured, even if Zethrid and Ezor left without us in the middle of the night, they could take something with them when they left. But they're not like that."

"No," Shiro said. He bent his head with a sidelong glance. "They don't seem like the type to sneak away."

"They never cared about being good before," said Keith. "And they still don't. The only thing they want's a place they can hold onto. They're loyal to people who give them a chance."

"But you still don't expect them to stay."

Stars were filtering through the shrouding dusk; Keith's eyes glittered with their hollow, dreaming light. "Not everyone's like us," he said. "Being loyal to someone isn't the same thing as wanting to be with them forever. Ezor and Zethrid have been fighting since they were born. Someday—they're going to want to try something different. And that's okay."

The space between them sang like an echo of every moment that had come before. Side by side on the shores of an alien world. In the seawater glow of the castle, his fingers on Keith's shoulder. Seven years ago, Keith could never have managed those words; they would have been a curse in his teeth. He'd grown from those days; he'd changed—just not enough to think that there would ever be a day when the people he chose stopped leaving him behind.

"Do you," Shiro said, "ever dream about the lions?"

He stopped, startled by his own traitorous mouth. But Keith looked at him like he'd felt the question rising in his marrows. "I used to," he said. His hands skimmed the rock, as if he might feel out familiar controls in the dents. It was a habit he understood; piloting was a rhythm that the body carried longer than memory. "For a couple years, I had these—dreams. They were kind of like visions, I guess. Galaxy clusters, blue giants. A lot of dust. But it's been a while since I've seen anything like that."

A breath flashed through him, envy so sharp that it turned his heart. Shiro faced forward. The desert was still. Through his lashes, the glimmering the horizon swept wider, wider, a quickening brushfire across the curve of the earth. 

"Sometimes," he told the flame. "I still dream that the Black Lion comes back. I'm on the Atlas, and we're chasing her through space. Everyone on my crew tells me that we can't catch up with her—that we'll burn out the engines, that we have to stop. And every time I look at her on the screen, she's farther away. I keep flying after her, but she never looks back. And she leaves me behind."

"You flew with her for a year," Keith said. "Do you really think she'd do that?"

Salt prickled his throat, heatless, wordless. Everything he'd known of the Black Lion had been what she'd shown him: weapons, dazzling patterns across her console, a road back to the sky. The space inside her mind had been vaster than empires—neutrino lights, quasars, red giants churning inside seismic impossible rings. He could have drowned in the stars of her, and his soul would have been nothing more than a gasp of static in her battle-roar.

"It doesn't matter," Shiro said. He rolled his shoulders, one after the other. "Even if she came back—I'm not the Black Paladin anymore. My place is different now."

"That's not _true_." 

Keith's eyes flashed over his, hard and daring. The slant of his jaw could have toppled the sun. "The lions didn't just choose us because we were there," he said. "You know that. They didn't care about Zarkon, or the Empire, or justice. They waited ten thousand years for us."

"Only you'd say that."

"Shiro—"

Keith broke off, and Shiro bit down a flurry of reflexes—to say _sorry_ , to goad him on, to turn away from the storm seething between them. They'd never talked about it. He'd never talked about his off-world years with anyone. What would he have said? A paladin wasn't a pilot, or a soldier, or a king. There was no translation for what they'd done, who they'd become before the war left them behind.

And still, he knew—if he talked about it, Keith would answer him. He could lash out and Keith would hold him fast, as sure as if they were still out there together. Standing together on an alien landing. Grappling against each other in that reeking, poisonous lab. As if the universe were still at war, and their future had a shape that could still be made whole.

"You know what I mean," Keith said. His voice caught the air between them, every breath a spark. "The Black Lion chose you as soon as we showed up. She did it for a reason. Nothing's ever going to change that. You're still the best paladin she could've asked for, Shiro." He breathed in. His fingers stuttered, gritting against his knee. "You're the best person I know."

Shiro looked at him; but he hadn't stopped looking at Keith since he'd come back. He knew the set of Keith's mouth, the way his lashes curved when he was startled. The heat of his breath on the tip of the tongue.

"Shiro," said Keith.

His throat crackled with an impossible thought. Shiro turned away. 

"Second-best," he said, low and dry. "Give yourself some credit."

In his shadow he felt Keith stop, and laugh.

They watched the sunset. The desert swayed around them—crickets chirring, grasses and stars murmuring like tides. In the dark, there was only his heartbeat, the warm tilt of Keith's shoulder against his. He hadn't been a paladin in years; but the thought was still worth something. That he remembered the weight of his armour, and the flex and purr of the Black Lion's wings above him. That he could talk about it, and be understood.

Something buzzed against his hip. Keith laughed as Shiro startled, fumbling for his datapad. Another alert shrilled across the screen as he flicked it open.

> _another meeting. :-/ at least they let me go early. takashi, where are you?_
> 
> _thinking about you._

  
Keith's shoulder knocked his. "Well? Did Veronica catch them stealing something yet?"

The datapad sagged in his grip; its light was a hollow mist under the warming night.

"No," Shiro said. He smiled, and set the rest aside. Just for a moment—just for this moment. "No—not yet."

  
  
  
  
  


Later he would remember nothing from the weeks before the summit but Keith.

All of his spare time unraveled like salt into water. The Atlas was a storm, flurrying with paperwork and panic. Zethrid stole a positron infuser prototype from the engineering department. For this infraction, she was banished to a week's service in the Atlas's storage levels. There, she taught the unit-workers a seedy variation of standard space poker, losing horribly until Ezor and Acxa cut her off, Ezor jeering with her arms wrapped around Zethrid's shoulders. Rizavi burned her free day on bullying the MFE squadrons into new formations. Three department heads filed complaints about Veronica, who'd swept off their brightest adjutants for a secret project.

("Are you upset because she's making your job harder, or because you're concerned about what she's up to?" said Shiro. "Both, obviously! This is the Garrison, Shirogane—we order our paranoia fuel in _bulk_ ," said the head of his tactics department.)

His desktop calendar frilled over with work. Calls from across the Coalition sealed up every corner of their schedules. They crammed calls between meetings and meals. On a working night, a bag-eyed Iverson propped a transmitter by their cafeteria trays as each of them took grim shots of silt-slick midnight coffee. 

Day after day: he slept, and woke, moving through the world with the taste of rust staining through his teeth.

But Keith was with him.

Time and again, he found Keith everywhere across the ship. He was in the hangar when Shiro went down for an inspection, arguing with the docking crew about where he could park the corvette. In the evening, Shiro discovered him crammed into the break-room with half the MFE ground-crews and a school of engineers, wrangling flight physics as Rizavi drew and re-drew the new flight formations.

Keith couldn't testify to the Coalition. But he had broken ground of dozens of planets, and they needed him. To the drafting adjutants, he told stories about what he'd seen on Vro-Seiira-Geo: its green dunes, its automata-driven production. One by one, his department heads began to pass along questions about other worlds. Trade practices, munitions, the etiquette of transferring senior officers to new postings in alien systems. Veronica requisitioned a datapad from storage and planted it in Keith's hood to keep track of him throughout the day. Slav lured him down to the engine room on some pretext. Six hours later, Shiro came back to see them in a standoff—Keith snarling behind a taut, gleaming particle barrier while Slav poured a host of scanning lights over his luxite blade.

He made things easier. There was no other way to think about it. Keith could drill the auxiliary fighters on emergency formations in his sleep. He could read through twenty pages of bureaucracy and distill the report down to its two-word essence. ("Don't bother.") Every part of the ship ran keener, quicker under his dark and studying eye. On quiet mornings, as sleepy light came filtering through the windshields, Keith fitted himself against Shiro's side, steering the Atlas out of its dreaming subroutines side by side.

That was the brightest part of the memory—the string of dawns that could have illuminated the whole year. For those first, hushed hours of the shift, the bridge was theirs alone. Two pilots, nameless and careless, moving in tandem. His arm braced against Keith's waist, tapping commands into the farthest console. Keith's voice burning through reports and messages, skimming hot against his cheek. 

His crew. His friend. His.

Over years, he had learned the Atlas down to its core—its ports, its thermal processors and stellar arrays, every alarm and bell that it could ring. But this was something new—flying his ship with someone else who could match its speeds. Someone else who knew how to command, who'd fought at the frontlines of the ten thousand-year war. Someone who understood the body rhythms of an alchemised ship.

The days went on, calls and presentations churning in an infinite coil. But in the mornings, Shiro breathed in, and felt the steel ray of the Atlas's bridge like a lighthouse beacon. Calling through through the exhaust, the shadows and the sea. Calling him home.

  
  
  
  
  


"So—who is this again?" said Keith.

His question was nearly lost in the bustle of the bridge. The ansible transmitter was still casting its frequencies across galaxies, searching for a connection. Static prickled along the screen like the edges of a banner. The crew was weaving from corner to corner—pulling up maps, cultural protocol feeds, talking points from every summit that Earth had attended in the last three years. Iverson and Curtis were bowed over a screen, squinting through a dense reel of extraterrestrial scripts. By the doors, three new junior officers argued in rounding hisses about who'd been on coffee duty.

At her own station, Veronica hooked an elbow over the back of her seat. She beckoned Keith over to her brimming screen. "Ashkeeper Zh'cari's the plenipote for the planet Vesh. That's in the Plasi-veotrix system—about two light-years away. Based on the Coalition's last census, Plasi-veotrix is as close as Vro-Seiira-Geo gets to neighbours, and Vesh's the unofficial leader of the system. The other two planets in the system don't sign anything unless Vesh's vetted it. So if we actually want a trading contract signed in the next month, Zh'cari's our best bet."

"They look familiar," said Keith. He squinted. "Have you called them before?"

"It, actually," Shiro said. He braced over the console. A smile flashed out of him, helpless, as Keith lifted his head. "We've been on a couple of the Coalition-wide calls together, but Earth hasn't had that much of a reason to reach out to Plasi-veotrix. They tend to be good at handling themselves."

"A little too good," Veronica said. "People talk about Vesh like it's the biggest mango at the bar." Her gaze swiped from face to face. She pinched her glasses, the picture of a communications officer, half-destroyed. "What? That's a real phrase."

"I have no idea what you just said," Keith said, arms folding. "When was the last time you slept?"

"Mm, you're much less cute when you're being perceptive." Her seat clanked into his, driving him towards the command station. "Out of the camera line, flyboy. The Vesh are _obsessed_ with formalities. We have a professional image to maintain."

A bell shivered through the bridge. The screens brightened, sketching out the frame of an incoming ansible transmission. Every crew member dove for their stations, flattening their lapels and collars, swiping the cowlicks from their ragged hair. Keith kicked his drifting chair to the corner of the command console, just out of frame. His smile caught Shiro with its full light, sweet as the end of a race. 

Shiro breathed deep, and held on. He authorised the connection.

Zh'cari rose into view. In the transmission static, its body was a cradle of flickers and buzzing lacework wings. Compound eyes lidded and shifted across its iron-lace torso. It leaned out from its long-chair, and lights danced across its limbs in winter colours—a restless tracery of greys and bruisy, rippling violets.

"Ashkeeper in the Pact of Seven, plenipotentiary of the planet Vesh," Veronica said. "Earth greets your grace, and sends its courtesies to your star. On behalf of the planet, we introduce the plenipotentiary Takashi Shirogane, admiral of the Atlas."

"Courtesies be to Earth's star as well. And all the stars between us." Zh'cari said. The thrum of it bloomed through the bridge like silt through water. Several eyes flicked to the command console. "I am familiar with the admiral."

Shiro bent his head. "It's nice to see you too, Ashkeeper," he said.

There was no need for small talk with Zh'cari. The mechanism that had drawn this meeting together was still grinding at work underneath their images. Policy papers and talking points flashed across the screen; Shiro read through every line, ceremonial as the words at a shrine. He mapped out the case for Vro-Seiira-Geo: its history as one of the best manufacturers known to the empire, its underground cities, its refusals to take any help that could not be repaid. Its record meant that it could not be accepted into the Coalition; but its people were no different than the people who had stood against the Galra in the end. They needed a chance. That was all.

He felt Zh'cari's gaze as he spoke. Its faceted eyes glittered, dense and spectral, casting shapeless reflections through the transmission. "You make a convincing case, Admiral. Yet Vesh must understand your interest in this matter. A planet like Vro-Seiira-Geo lies outside the scope of Earth's known interests."

At his side, Keith's stillness burned like lamplight. "Not," Shiro said, "if you believe in the Coalition's mission."

"Zzh. Yes. 'The recovery of one for the good of all.'" Zh'cari drew what might have been fingers across its chair; its movement stirred the air like the verse of a hive. "You have asked a question of us. So we can also ask of you. Vesh receives reports from other Coalition representatives. We are told that the Atlas is sheltering paramilitary operatives. These operatives belong to an organisation which does not have the blessings of the Coalition. Out of respect. For the sake of the trade you intend. We ask you: are these stories true, or shadows?"

He should have known. "True," Shiro said. "But the situation's not what it sounds like."

Zh'cari's hum rose, beckoning.

"I invited Keith to the Atlas to recover after a recent mission," said Shiro. "He's here as my guest, and my friend."

"A recent mission," said Zh'cari. "On Vro-Seiira-Geo."

Shiro raised his chin. "I understand that Vesh values transparency," he said. "It's a value that Earth shares. I can disclose that I was on vacation when I visited Vro-Seiira-Geo with Keith. I never talked to anyone in my official capacity, and their officials were aware that I was off-duty. No one ever asked me to compromise my integrity. I'm making this offer because of what I saw on the planet. This proposal was my idea. It's the right thing to do."

"On behalf of Earth," Veronica said, startling him. "The crew of the Atlas confirms the account of its admiral. Earth only wants to further the objectives of the Coalition. It has no planetary interest outside its own system."

Vesh thrived on formalities; but truth, for them, was a duty as heavy as ceremony. Zh'cari's head dipped in recognition. "Yet it does not serve for Vesh to underestimate the interests of Earth."

"Excuse me?"

"Every person at this meeting represents a greater force," Zh'cari said. Its voice was a dirge, seething without end. "We must be clear on whose shadows we carry behind us. Earth is present. Vesh is present. Will you tell me that there are no others with an interest on your end?"

Keith rose. In the pooling glow of the transmission, his spine settled like a sword; light gleamed down the steel of his jaw. "I remember you now," he said.

Zh'cari's gaze drifted to him, lingering under some dense, faceted memory. "Forgive my caution," it said as Keith folded his arms. "This isn't the first time that you've involved yourself in a Coalition matter that does not concern you."

"I brought you information about an undiscovered Galra base operating on one of your moons," Keith said.

"We recall a request for a meeting. We recall tracing it to a signal beacon registered to Earth. Still, and always, we recall your voice—the voice of the Blade of Marmora, speaking to us of our duties to the Coalition."

"It's your system. Did you not _want_ to know that?"

"Vesh does not think in terms of the past. I do nothing now but observe. You come. You go. You answer to no one. Half of you rises from the blood of tyrants. The other half from the blood of saviors. Galra and paladin. Blade and legend. What is your every word, if it is not a commandment?"

Keith's fists jolted. "I'm just a Blade now. That's all."

"What you are," Zh'cari said, "does not change the power that you carry. No one can cast off their legacy. It is a known thing that the lions of Voltron vanished five years ago. It is also known that the lion will always respond to the distress of their paladin. Who can say what a paladin might feel if a planet refuses his judgment?" Its swarming frame had settled; every eye rested on Keith with animal judgment. "That is a useful mystery, to be sure. Whether or not you desire it. You will always have the promise of power without limit."

"This," Keith bit out, "is about keeping a planet from starving. Do you _need_ someone to beg you to do the right thing?"

His echoes thundered through the bridge; but Zh'cari didn't sway. "A true beggar comes in private. They offer what kindness they can in exchange for the treasures that they hope to take. You stand before me today as you have before so many others. Aboard the most powerful ship left in the universe. Armed with the will of your planet. A legend flying behind you like a death-banner. Your idea of begging," it said, "could shatter an empire."

"That's enough," Shiro said.

He'd forgotten. How could he have forgotten? He hadn't been the Black Paladin in years; but the memory of the universe was not so brief as his. For centuries, every planet under the Galra Empire had lived in fear. Fear had steeped through their marrows and haunted all their dreams. Zarkon was dead, but that meant nothing in a nightmare. There would always be other things to fear in their dark and brimming dimension.

"You seek to have Vesh in hand before you risk an offer," Zh'cari said, resonant as clockwork. "Let me, then, remind you. The will of Vesh is the will of the hive. We are allies to the Coalition. We will not fly outside its paths. There are formal mechanisms to make your proposal, and to negotiate it. I do not bend our system to the convenience of the few."

Standing at the foot of the console, Keith's shoulders bristled, too far away to touch. "With all due respect," Shiro said, "those mechanisms were put into place to protect people."

Zh'cari flickered. The chirr of its limbs was regretful but without sympathy. "Vesh is independent now," it said. "But I do not confuse independence with invulnerability. It is a duty to each of us, that we must protect those in our care."

_What have you been doing with all this time besides getting softer, weaker, spoiled?_

"We do not speak today of greatness that has come and gone," Zh'cari said, ruthless through the light-years, the lilt of a planet underneath its droning voice. "Vesh looks only at the present. The Atlas is still our savior. Yet even a savior cannot act without consequence. If the Coalition's mandates weigh heavy on you, Admiral, then it is your duty to kneel and yield your strength. No just entity in this universe has the right to enforce its own laws at the expense of others. That is the foundation of our alliance. Is it not?"

Shiro breathed deep. Through the backs of his eyes, an alien desert lay burning, empty, as stark as starlight. "We'll see you at the summit," he said.

  
  
  
  
  


Their farewells took ten minutes, measured and unforgiving as a religious rite. But at last, Zh'cari bent. Its head turned; the edges of its limbs shivered like the sky before lightning. Static lapped over its image in a seafoam wave, and it vanished.

At once, every officer sprang out of their seats, cursing, scrambling, pitching over to one another's battle-stations. The bridge was a fathomless wave of uniform jackets and scaled screens. Their whispers rose as analysts and pilots alike began to break down the call together. Of course, his crew'd had the advantage of needing to be seen and not heard. They must have been seething with data over the ship channels for a while. 

Shiro turned; but Keith was gone. 

Under the noisy tide, his heartbeat dropped into stillness. He headed through the doors. Artificial lights sprang up as he walked, a hazy thread through the dark. Around the corner, he could hear footsteps moving across the steel floors in a pattern that he knew.

He turned the corner. From the hall's end Keith glanced back, and started.

"Going somewhere?" Shiro said.

Keith stopped. His shoulders rolled, then settled. "I figured I shouldn't get in the way."

Shiro crossed the floor. Every step seemed to pulse between them, thin as constellations seen through rain, a memory on the tip of the tongue, something that could shift and be lost to the dark at any moment. "I know that wasn't how we were hoping this would go. But we already knew that the summit presentation was our best chance to get something through for Vro-Seiira-Geo. Nothing's changed. We'll still put everything we've got into this—Keith, I promise you."

The words settled on Keith, then flickered out. "Right," he said, sinking against the wall. "I know."

It was nothing like the voice he'd used on the bridge, low and guttering. He'd known Keith for too long to misunderstand it. "Keith," said Shiro. "This wasn't your fault."

"You heard Veronica," Keith said. "Vesh's all about doing things right. Zh'cari took your call, even when it didn't have to. It was going to give your proposal a chance—until it figured out I was with you."

"Our proposal," Shiro said, rough and quick. "Keith. This deal wouldn't be anywhere close to being finished if you weren't here with me. You've done so much for the Atlas just by being with us. You have no idea how glad I am that you came."

"Are you?"

A breath curved in his throat like a hook, drawing heat all the way up. "Of course I am," Shiro said. "I know these aren't ideal circumstances for either of us—but you've been doing good work here. It's been good to be with you again."

"I just," Keith said. He swallowed. "I can't stop thinking that I should leave. I've done everything that I can do on the Atlas. I should've been gone weeks ago."

He heard it through a vast roar, hungry as the sea. An impulse shivered through his fingers—to cage Keith back against the wall, to press down until he felt the truth of things. But Shiro only smiled. "Sure you aren't just tired of me?"

"What?" His gaze jumped back, startled, electrified. " _No_ , that's not—"

Shiro clasped his shoulder. In the shadows, the touch seemed to ring with its own soft light, as brilliant as the Atlas singing in his veins. "I know," he said.

Keith stared at him; his eyes were stark as haunting. "Shiro," he began, but bit back the rest. When he spoke again his tone was even, with the clarity of a line drawn from star to star. "You've got your crew. I've already done what I can to help out with getting the deal together. If we're going to make sure Vro-Seiira-Geo has a shot, there's other things I could be doing. Something that'll give them a backup option."

"Why can't we do those things together?"

The question snapped through Keith like turbulence. Shiro held on. "I told you before," he said, feeling the jut of Keith's shoulders, his glittering pulse. "Nothing you've been doing with the Blades is something that the Coalition would come out against. Pretty sure we could use a little shaking up."

"Shiro," he breathed. "I don't belong here."

It rose between them like an echo from a dark cell, an arena floor. Keith's head had bowed. He held himself against the wall as if he could carve his way through steel. He couldn't be used to talking about this, any more than Shiro had been—drifting from mission to mission every month, moving like blood through a battlefield.

"The war's over, Keith," he said again—like prayer, like a confession. He must've said it a dozen times over the years: on a platform looking out to a vast, roaring crowd, to the still air of an alien ship, in chambers ringed in ice. This was nothing new. "Maybe this isn't your home right now—but it could be. You could go back to Earth. You could work with me on the Atlas. You can go anywhere you want, Keith—you don't need to give up parts of yourself to save everything else."

"I'm not," Keith started. His breath hitched, and Shiro steadied him; his mouth parted, and his head tilted up. "I'm not giving up anything, Shiro. The first time I left Earth back then—I figured I'd go back someday, when I missed it. I waited for it for a while. But things kept happening. No matter how far I fly, it never feels like I've gone far enough. There's planets I've never even heard of out there—planets that might not even know the Galra Empire exists. And every time I look back, I just think—I need to keep going. I never want to stop." They were closer now, foreheads brushing, eyes cast low. He breathed, and Shiro felt the wondering tremor of it down to his bones. "Do you get that?"

His throat tightened; his pulse swayed behind his eyelids in a dreaming current. "I used to," Shiro said at last. "But that feeling doesn't last. Sam had it—even Iverson had it a long time ago. The thrill goes away. At some point, you're going to settle. That's how life works."

Keith made a sound, soft and untranslatable. His gaze was fever-dark, deep enough swallow the stars. "How do you know?" he said. "When you should settle."

_You just know_. There would come a day when he would look at the maps carving up his screens, the untarnishable light of far-flung stars, and set them aside for another time. When he was free again—when he could see them without regret for what he was leaving undone. He would cross the landing of an alien planet and feel only the pulse of the ship at his back, flooding out the hollows that his lion had left behind. He would look at a familiar dish, a well-lit bed, the steadiness of a door, and know that he could never again ask the universe for more than this: survival and the simple things.

But he couldn't say that.

"Someday," said Shiro, "you're going to find a place where you stay for a little longer than you expected for the mission. Maybe the people there need you more than usual. Maybe you're just tired. One day goes by. And another. And before you know it, you can't leave anymore. After that—you keep taking it day by day. You look for all the good points about where you are. All the people who're counting on you. And as long as there's even one person left who needs what you're doing, you stay."

"And you're happy with that."

The flex of his throat clumped like ash. They were still too close: Keith's gaze turned up to his, jaw tilting into the curve of Shiro's palm. The promise of his mouth in the half-light, caught on a whisper too hot to breathe out loud.

"I'm where I'm supposed to be," Shiro said. His fingers shivered, and fell. "And I don't want you to give anything up if you're not ready for it yet. I'm just saying—well, we're pretty good together. Aren't we?"

The words seemed to drain something out of the air. Keith turned his head; but he didn't shift away. "Yeah," he said, low as surrender. They lingered in the hollows of a vanishing moment, breathing in the dark. "We are."

  
  
  
  
  


Afterwards, Shiro went back to his station.

The bridge was deserted. Screens glowed through the dusky shadows, a tide of facets roiling in serpentine patterns: crossbands, helixes, diamonds cut in green-blue-gold. He touched the command console and it yawned into light. A hologram flipped open, inventory and system scans unfurling like tapestries. A dreamy glow traced along the board as the ship stirred out of its alloyed sleep. For five years he'd bowed to this station. He'd worked to the pulse of the ship beneath him, a tempo as celestial and sure as a lion's heartbeat. 

For the first time Shiro listened, and heard only its mechanical silence, answerless as the sea.

A step cracked behind him. His nerves sang out. With combat reflexes, he slashed the locking sequence across his console. Reports went tumbling into blackness, and Shiro whirled from his station.

Veronica fell back, boots stuttering, eyes flown wide. Then, in a heartbeat, she gathered herself again. Her brows flicked up; a fist ground against her cocked hip. "Well, I was going to say _Earth to Shirogane_ , but..."

A laugh traced through him, shivering, but faded before it touched the air. "Sorry. We don't have the budget for that kind of long-distance call." He palmed across the dreaming console without unlocking it. "Did you forget something in here?"

"Just wanted to take a look at the Vro-Seiira-Geo proposal one last time," Veronica said, with the artlessness of someone who'd skipped every Garrison-mandated lecture on limiting overtime. "Since Iverson's finally taking his day off tomorrow." 

"Tomorrow?"

"You know he always says nothing happens on the first day of a summit." Her voice thickened in an indulgent echo. "'They're just staff meetings, Shirogane. All that's different's the paperwork and the offworld singing'."

"The singing was one time," Shiro said. His brows crooked up. "I'll bet he's just afraid they'll ask him to join in, one of these days."

"Mm, I'll order earplugs in bulk for the bridge crew, just in case," Veronica said. "Did you see Zethrid anywhere on your way in?"

"Why would Zethrid be around the bridge?"

"Oh, you know," Veronica said. "She's got some issues to work out. And she can't access the ship's lower levels anymore, now that Sam's installed the new protocols. So she's been getting lost a lot."

Shiro bent his head in brief, rusty thought. He watched the jut of her knuckles as she pinched her glasses. "This is about that training routine you gave her, isn't it?"

"Excuse me," Veronica said with dignity. "With Zethrid, it's never _just_ about one thing."

"Right," Shiro said. "She hit the engineering department already. So technically there's two things left for her to steal before she wins."

Veronica's narrow stare cut over him. She curved away without an answer, heading for her own station. Her screen lit, consoles shimmering in sea colours as the telemetry came pouring through. "Well," she said. "Are we gonna talk about what happened with the call?"

Shiro raked through his hair. "What's there to talk about? Zh'cari told us it won't move forward with a proposal unless it comes through the right channels. We're working on getting it through the right channels. That's all."

"It's nice to have some back-up options," Veronica said. "For example, I've got a couple adjutants working on heavy presentations for the rest of the summit. Tanaka's slide-deck's probably thick enough to kill a man. Maybe we can bore the voting reps to sleep and sneak some approvals through while they're snoozing."

"Not one of your better plans," Shiro said. "But keep thinking."

Veronica swiped at her screen. Every report collapsed down to her taskbar. In the hush she draped herself over her seat, neat as stitching. "It's not the worst play in the world," she said. "Borrowing Earth's authority while he's standing with a non-Coalition organisation. I'd give it a seven out of ten. But he's not going to be able to keep that going for much longer."

He had known for hours; but it still jarred him, a razor's edge against some secret softness that he hadn't known was left to be carved open. "He'll keep it going for as long as he can," Shiro said, watching the lights sway. "Keith's never played safe a day in his life."

Veronica tapped her pen against the rim of her station. "You know," she said, "Earth's been making some efforts in the outreach department for a while ... If we're going to make the full pivot into rebranding as an intergalactic haven, the Atlas could probably use an alien representative on the bridge."

A sound flashed in his teeth, shapeless, impossible to voice. "Keith," said Shiro at last. "You're talking about Keith."

Stars trickled across the windows. Veronica rolled her wrist. "We all know you guys work well together. Being around you's probably the most stable I've ever seen him. Let's face it—you'd be doing him a favour. A couple of weeks of downtime to knock out the kinks in the transition ... and we'd be set. You could keep doing what you used to do together. Just on a whole new level."

What they'd used to do. Old memories pricked under his eyelids. Keith's spine bolted tight, driving back the brunt of a training sword. His shout blazing through a canyon. His hand against Shiro's nape, pulling him up from the ashes of an alien fire. _You saved me._ Every time that he'd shuddered, faltered, and kept going with Keith's body bracing his, warmth beating between them like a lifeline.

The soft, dark parting of his mouth in a stillwater hall.

Shiro traced his arm, feeling through the gleaming whisper of alchemy under steel. "It doesn't have to be Keith," he said. "If you really think we need an alien representative—well, Slav could probably use some exercise, for one thing."

"Slav's part of the engine room," Veronica said. Her smile quirked. "We need someone who can keep up with you, and you know it."

"You've never seen how Keith gets when he's cooped up."

"Trust me, I've heard stories," said Veronica. "When I was in my last year, the instructors were already drawing lots over him. Loser had to supervise his basic flight sim classes and make sure he didn't break through the safety overrides."

"That," said Shiro. He stopped, and started again. "Doesn't sound like Keith."

Veronica looked at him. "Uh _huh_ ," she said. "Luckily, our current ship's _only_ worth a few thousand times as much as Garrison sim tech."

"Funny."

"Also," Veronica said, without a missed beat, "I'm pretty sure you could use someone new on the bridge. In general."

He might have bought the excuse from anyone else. But Veronica steered the Atlas's affairs with the surety of a pilot. Bringing Keith abroad was more than a recruitment. With good timing and the right tone, the Atlas could ratify all the actions that he'd taken outside the scope of the Coalition. They could douse every grudge that'd ever stirred against him across the stars. They could settle Earth's authority around Keith's shoulders like armour, like a mantle, and draw the Blade of Marmora towards a true alliance.

Veronica was kind, brisk, measured. But more than anything else, she'd never turned down an opportunity.

"We've only got seats up here for six officers," Shiro said, and looked at her. "If this is your idea of a resignation, Veronica—"

"Please. I've got ransomware locked into my station, and a spreadsheet for my savings account that projects my career out for another twenty years. Until I hit my benchmark for retirement, they can pry this job out of my dead, _rotting_ hands."

There was never any use in arguing with Veronica. She came to every debate with three books' worth of preparation behind her. Still, Shiro braced against his station. He called up reports, a labyrinth of charts and figures, then struck them off again. "This isn't necessary," he said, softer. "Between you, Iverson, and the adjutants, the bridge feels pretty well-covered. And it looks like Curtis didn't have any problems taking over for me while I was gone."

Veronica laughed. It trilled across the walls like a cascade of sparks. "Oh, totally," she said. "We are what you made us."

Her gaze was roving, feline; the end of her voice curved like a claw. "Veronica," said Shiro, and made it easy. "Is there something you want to tell me?"

"Like what?" Her smile cooled. "It's just the truth, right? You were the one who petitioned the Garrison for each of our promotions when they tried to make you admiral. I know _I_ definitely wouldn't be here without you."

"Right back at you," said Shiro, watching. "Anything else?"

Directness was Veronica's weak point; she would work herself through endless mazes of statecraft and logic, but she couldn't fight the instinct to be fair. Her spine tightened; her pen drummed against her palm. "I don't think you're helping anyone by leaving Curtis in charge," she said.

She could have crossed the room and punched him; it would have been easier to understand. "He wanted me to," Shiro said. His veins were reeling, bewildered, electric. "He's always said that he wanted to try commanding the ship on his own."

"Are you sure that's what he said?"

His breath jumped in his teeth. Veronica had been in Curtis's year. They'd come up to the Atlas together, side by side on the stage. In their first year abroad, they'd lived out of each other's pockets—Veronica crouching on Curtis's chair, keying corrections into his charts, Curtis folding himself over the back of her seat during meal-breaks. She knew him better than anyone in the crew.

"Anyway," Veronica said. She pinned an open report in place, drawing it through idle, shimmering loops across the screen. "We were going to have to pick up new staff eventually. The Coalition keeps getting bigger every year, and there's only so much Atlas to pass around the stars. Even back in year two, we were basically running ourselves ragged to handle the annual summit. And then there's you."

"What," said Shiro, "about me."

"Part of the reason that Earth's diplomatic presence even got this big is because of you," Veronica said. There was something in her voice, light but not gentle. "You get _involved_. At every summit, you talk to people from galaxies we've never even heard of, and you listen. And every year, we get another mission that takes us farther and farther from Earth. So—" She dusted away the report. It caught the screen's edge, and puffed into glittering, endless motes. "At some point, you're going to need someone who can watch your back. Not the way I do it, or the way Iverson does it. Someone who can give you what you need before you find it."

"Have I been that hard on you guys?"

Her head snapped up. If there was any doubt in her, he couldn't have seen it in a thousand years. Her jaw was set, eyes clear, whole frame brimming with a shared and unshakable dream. "You know you haven't," Veronica said. "You're our _admiral_ , Shiro. None of us would be here, if it weren't for you."

But she broke off, tugging at her own hair. In a wave, the tension melted off her bones. "Wow. That got heavy," Veronica said. He could nearly have believed her silkthread smile. "Okay, enough distractions for one night. I'm going to run through the points on the chart for the trade routes. After that, I'm heading to bed."

"Good plan," Shiro said, as she turned away, holding him behind her in shadow. "I might do the same thing in a minute."

Halfway through her console's closing sequence, Veronica stooped over her screen. She snapped her fingers, beckoning. "Hey, did you move my chart? It's not in any of my work-folders."

"I like to think I've learned my lesson about touching your work-folders without asking," Shiro said drily. He started to shift through his screens. "Hold on. I'll bring up the drive history." The search took a single crystalline minute. Its report unfolded across the pane. "It looks like the file was moved to an external drive—about an hour ago."

Veronica stiffened. Slowly her head craned back, staring at the bridge's unlocked doors. "Right," she said, "after all the authorised crew-members left the bridge."

She dropped like a curse into her seat.

  
  
  
  
  


There was a rhythm to working long hours. Time and again, his exhaust burned out to a dry-eyed ease. Sourness rolled over his tongue like an anchor. Screens burned through the hush, on and on, steady as signal-fires.

Shiro went on. Hours floated by. The summit presentations grew clearer, and sharper. The lights sank like meltwater. The standard clocks had clicked into a new day-cycle by the time he left the bridge. Alone, Shiro stumbled through the ghostly corridors. In the community showers, he hooked his arm at the end of the stall and scrubbed off in hasty, dreaming splashes.

_Being around you's probably the most stable I've ever seen him. You'd be doing him a favour._

Acxa had said it first, all gaunt and inflexible light: _the point of a mission is to see it through._ But there'd been signs before that. He'd picked up fistfuls of them over the last month. From Ezor, from Curtis. From Sam's rusty laughter, saying, _I don't think I've ever seen him hold still for this long._ The husky thrill of Aaklir's voice rising through a halogen morning. _It was Keith who taught me this—you cannot compromise what you know is right._

The way that Keith had looked at him across the pillar: with the brutal clarity of someone who saw nothing but an ending.

His vision churned in bright chains of water. Wartime habits were hard to unlearn; but this was one way to do it. If Keith stayed, they could split the shifts in command—fielding emergency calls, steering into new stars, handling the last ship that remembered the lions of Voltron. Keith could remind him how to coax speed out of the Atlas's firework engines. He could pass on all of the Coalition's vast reserves of cultural reports and bureaucratic secrets, and trust Keith to use them. They could fly together again, close as they'd been in the gunpowder days of the Galra Empire. Keith's shoulder against his at the console, hands overlapping, warm enough to carry him through the stars.

If he stayed.

His palm clamped over his face. Shiro broke into a sputter, and rinsed.

He pitched back to the suite in a fog. The hallways flowed by in sketching lines; the doors hissed open. From the sofa in the anteroom, a silhouette lifted his head. "You're back," Curtis said, with a hitch of drowsy, startled pleasure. "I thought I might have to come and get you."

Shiro stared at him. Exhaust murmured in his bones. Across the walls, the lamps were burning low, all heartbeat radiance. Curtis was a mirage of shadowy impressions. Dark eyes, dark hair. The slope of his bare shoulder limned in sunset colours.

He said something back, nonsensical and quick. In the bathroom, he blurred through his evening rites—changing, brushing, polishing the dust from the grooves of his arm. Curtis caught him again at the door. A kiss sank between them, minted and coolly familiar. Nothing of fire in this kiss—nothing like the raw, charged breath he'd found in that quiet hall—

Shiro broke away, then tried a smile. "I'm a little tired," he said. "Mind if we turn off the lights?"

He shifted towards the bed, and Curtis followed. The night came drifting down.

Under the covers, a knee brushed his thigh. Fingers smoothed over his arm, warm as a gasp of summer. In the dark, every nerve ignited. Shiro turned back, unseeing. His thumb hooked the corner of a jaw, and he caught the shiver that came spilling onto his tongue. Years ago, he could have named every twist and slide of Curtis's body against his. But it'd been a long time since they'd done it like this—half-seen, oversaturated, moving against each other with friction and half-intentions. Starlight dipped across the sheets. Curtis's lidded eyes glinted like knifepoints; his hair swayed into the shadows, longer, black as ashes, unfamiliar. His hips rocked up, and Shiro felt his new, stuttering impatience like an engine casting sparks.

"Takashi—"

Shiro crushed their mouths together. Curtis sputtered beneath him, and he pulled back. "Sorry," said Shiro, tasting the lie in his own shudder. He shifted; his fingers curled over a slow, thickening pulse. "Just—let me take care of you. All right?"

He couldn't think about it. Rhythm was a smear down his palm, the slick, flushed jut of Curtis's cock into his grip. He was careful, deliberate, thumb rolling in circles around the slit, closer, closer, until Curtis was clinging to his shoulder, heels squirming along the sheets. "I," he panted.

"Don't," said Shiro.

He knew, then. His fist knuckled against the dip of Curtis's nape. Heat arched into him, and he savoured the shock, the impact that rolled through him like flight momentum. They rocked together, running on blind adrenaline, clumsy under the weight of a long day and years long lost. His whole body burned with the nameless fever of it. A mouth yielding under his, hips grinding and jarring, the taste on his tongue like salt, copper, the last pulse of desert light.

How long he'd wanted this, after all.

The body beneath his came with a blank, emptying shudder. He collapsed, and Shiro closed his eyes. In the dark, he felt the edge sharpening, trembling through him. Like leaning over a cliff at sunset; like stars shattering some alien sky. A vision he could have only once.

He held his breath; he thought of a name. And Shiro let go.

  
  
  
  
  



	8. Chapter 8

  
  
  
  
  


They reached the summit an hour after waking.

In drowsy silence, the Atlas settled into the docking rings of Zwaote. They drifted from node to shining node, wheeling in slow circles as the elevators were tethered into the ship's bay. 

Shiro took the third ride down with the rest of the crew. Starlight came filtering through the chamber. He watched as a new day prickled across the pale emptiness. A city rose from the liminal moondust. The world below had settled into districts already. Their biospheres arched across the land, glass facets corseted by herringbone steel. Everywhere he looked, streets were shining with cables and synthetic stone, whetted sharp with the new-minted light. 

Each year, planets across the Coalition sent architects, builders, drivers, painters, to a new deserted moon. Together they drew up plans for a new world. Long after they were gone, Zwaote would carry on, blossoming, brightening. It might become anything. An embassy. A research outpost. A city which might one day send out its own explorers.

Everything went on.

An artificial voice belled across the landing, guided them into a tangle of dim corridors. If there was a name for places like these, he didn't know it. Obsidian walls, glass worked fine as lace. The air as thin as a mountaintop's, breathless on the cusp of radiance.

One by one, they filtered into the dome. The room had been built to hold the gathering of galaxies. Above them, the walls yawned into a blind and forceless void. Elsewhere, engines were rolling in sharp, mechanical harmony. Lamps drifted through the deeps with angelfish grace, scattering mist and chemical lights. 

Each delegation had their own platform, tiered and vast as a pyramid. They circled through the air, their rounded balustrades veined with shining gold. The bridge officers filed across the first tier of Earth's platform, dressed in Garrison regalia, loam colours and gleaming tassels. They moved in ceremonial order: Shiro leading, then Veronica and Curtis, each wearing the cut stripes of the absent officer whose role they would fill for the session; then Sam shepherding a line of adjutants, tottering under towers of policy memos and presentation tech.

They started to set up. The rest of the Atlas's officers drifted into the tiers behind them. Conversations rippled through the emptiness, clips of gossip and engineering dialects. Somewhere in the crowd, Keith must be settling in—talking to the junior officers, or reining Ezor back. Looking up for stars across the distant ceiling, maybe, with the same faultless gaze.

A hand settled beside his along the railing. He looked up, and Veronica rocked on her heels. "So," she said, lilting and drawn out. "Showtime?"

"Looks like it." At the platform's edge, three of Veronica's adjutants were cornering each other into a triangle, cramming last-minute over binders thick as tombstones. Shiro smiled. "We're ready."

"It should be a pretty clean presentation. We've got the main screen set up, and I marked every important point in the memo with the green page-tabs." She pinched her glasses, brisk but fretful. "Remember, don't go off-script. There's always a few representatives waiting for Earth to trip up and say something they can call out. We can't give them _any_ leverage. Our message has to be simple and literal. We get ten minutes to present, five minutes for people to object, and five minutes to make our rebuttals to anything that gets brought up. We can keep going outside of that time if we have to, but the motion's going to have to come under the authority of Article C-2h(l)(a), Section XR—"

He clasped her arm. "Veronica," Shiro said. A flinch welled under his grip, then smoothed away. Their eyes caught in simple understanding. "You've done a lot in just a couple weeks. More than anyone else could've done. Thank you."

The doors thundered shut. Veronica bent her head in a mute glimmer. Together they turned to their work.

The room cooled into silence. The lamps swept through a garden of colours: green, violet, the gold-blue gasp of raw flame. Platforms rose and fell, circled in altar lamps, as the delegations greeted the Coalition.

The first argument spilled out before they'd finished the introductions. Something about trade sanctions, then restrictive export controls, then a recent interdict on intersystem bounty hunting along the Zugnaj-Mizoplax route. Representative after representative drew themselves up to speak. Shiro felt the shape of each separate word; but the meaning was a jumble of bureaucracy and endless delays.

He had waited weeks to come here. To hear this.

But Shiro held his place. He listened as the adjutants shuffled and hissed behind him, arranging the presentation screens—as Veronica leaned out to drop Earth's answers into the seething pool of statecraft. Across the platforms, lights dropped and flared as each planet made its motions. Shiro reached up when he was cued, and answered, and smiled, neat as a body caught on strings.

And then their turn came.

Lamps flurried over their platform. Every face lit down the row.

Shiro rose. From the corner of his eye, he could see Keith's face gleaming in the highest reaches of the gallery, clear as a constellation.

He turned his head, looking forward.

In a way, he'd been telling this story in one shape or another since the end of the war. The fate of Vro-Seiira-Geo was the fate of so many other planets cast across the stars. He knew it down to his bones. The people of Vro-Seiira-Geo had been broken over millennia, forced into service for a war they hadn't chosen. They'd had their children stolen, their futures stripped like mines. Now they were on the brink of starving because of choices that had never been theirs to make. This was the legacy of the Galra war; but it couldn't be the ending.

They had more to offer, he said. Vro-Seiira-Geo's factories could still be run, and turned to different products. They could farm; they could forge. Their engineers had no parallel. But even if they'd come empty-handed, the Coalition would have owed them an answer. The war was over. There were no sides left but this one. What was the use of an alliance that couldn't protect its people?

He'd settled into the cadence of a speech, unthinking—felt it only as the last ringing echo shivered from his tongue. The lights burned, drowning, widening. Shiro's fist twitched against his thigh. He faced the hard, clear silence, and waited.

"You speak as though their authority is yours to dispense."

He knew the voice. Its echo lit him through, nerve and tendon, teeth and spine, understanding as quick as a gasoline flare. Across the room, Zh'cari looked back. Lamplight split across its jewelled, buzzing eyes. 

"This isn't an official proposal," Shiro said. He'd played the political game for long enough to understand its rhythm, the things that he could and couldn't say. "Earth isn't planning to make any deals on behalf of Vro-Seiira-Geo. But they know that my platform goes a little farther than theirs, so they're letting me help out. I'm sure they'll be happy to deal with Vesh personally, if your planet's willing to accept their deal."

"Presume they survive," Zh'cari said. "What comes after?"

"They'll keep living on their own planet. Do we need to know more?"

"You don't loose a wild animal before you've tested its caging," said Zh'cari.

Its echo struck like a blade. Shiro breathed in. "The people on Vro-Seiira-Geo," he said, "aren't animals."

"And yet I see no representatives for them today. Earth speaks for them. Their proposal targets Coalition planets. Therefore, I ask of Earth: does Vro-Seiira-Geo intend to join the Coalition? Or will the Coalition extend its authority over planets who have rejected its system?"

Of all the tricks that politicians liked to try, this might have been the worst kind. He could argue about history, and intent, and the fairness of a deal; but no one could defend against a theoretical, a future turned weapon. "I think you're looking too far ahead," Shiro said, even so. "This deal isn't going to lead to any of those things by default. We need to focus. Right now, we have people in front of us who need our help. I'm asking who's willing to offer that."

"In effect. You wish for them to be treated as Coalition members. Without answering to our restrictions."

"The Coalition's more than a collection of _trade deals_ ," Shiro said.

"Yes," said Zh'cari, with a drawl like iron. "Above all things—the Coalition is a pact to remember. Who among us does not recall the ships which flew over our homes? Who has cast aside the shape of those forge-marks that stamped their prison cells? The Galra cracked our stars. They tore our worlds apart. But they could never have done so. Without standing on the backs of factories like Vro-Seiira-Geo."

It wasn't speaking to him. Through its lacework armour, the hive that was Zh'cari teemed and crawled, a tempest of gallium eyes, calling with the choral, clustering echoes of one and many.

They'd misunderstood. The planet Vesh had survived centuries in the Galra Empire; it'd led its star-system out from the ashes of the war, two light-years out from Vro-Seiira-Geo. But a few light-years would have been no distance at all in the Galra Empire. For millennia, Vesh must have heard stories about Vro-Seiira-Geo. The pride of the Empire's production planets, the whetstone of Zarkon's fleet. That was the cage that the Galra had crushed them into: planet after isolated, starving planet giving up their children, their harvests, their weapons. Always hearing stories of worlds that had done better: worlds that had earned their survival.

_We built his cannons, his armoury, every panel and frame of his flagship,_ Vro-Seiira had said. _We were the best of his vassals, as we needed to be. And now there is no one in the universe who would look at our history and forgive us._

"If you want to deal with the things they've done, we can do that," Shiro said, louder. The silence shuddered; he might have been speaking into a starless void. "But not right now. They don't have much time left. At this point, not taking any action for Vro-Seiira-Geo's as good as cutting them down."

"But Vro-Seiira-Geo is not a Coalition planet," Zh'cari said. In the shadows, its body was a planetesimal haze, a vibration of intent. "It has never attempted to join the Coalition. The only reason its name has come before us today is that an unrelated planet has seen fit to report its work." 

"That doesn't answer my question."

"I believe it does." On and on, its voice ran the curve of the room. "We are not tyrants like the Galra. We do not cast our laws aside. Vesh supports Earth's motion to have Vro-Seiira-Geo, once known as the free planet Seiira, recognised as an independent planet outside of the Coalition's authority. Let all the standard privileges and consequences accompany."

"Earth's motion has been heard," said another voice, before Shiro could speak. A plenipote leaned forward. Light carved down their spiraling horns, baring the stripes of a Ghau-yei commander. "Vesh has seconded it. Unless there are meaningful objections, this concludes the initial motion and the response. Those in favour of closure on the matter of Vro-Seiira-Geo?"

The chamber shimmered. One by one, the platform lamps swept up into a damning alignment.

Lights, lights. His pulse thrummed with them, ghosts whirling through the backs of his eyes. Ten minutes to present. Five minutes for objections. Zh'cari had been careful. It had delivered Vesh's protests in a way that challenged Vro-Seiira-Geo's right to the Coalition's help, but left no stain of its opposition on the official record. No plenipote could have missed what it meant; but it didn't matter. The trade deal had Earth's name scrawled all over the drafts; it was Earth's weight in the Coalition, anchoring every promise that Vro-Seiira-Geo would make.

He didn't have to convince the universe to trust Vro-Seiira-Geo, or to forgive it. All they needed was an open hand: permission to survive.

By reflex, Shiro looked back. Faces stared back at him along the row. Veronica, Curtis, Sam, the adjutants Tanaka, Supelli, and Chaturvedi. Six staff members, holding seven seats.

_Iverson's finally taking his day off tomorrow,_ Veronica'd said. He'd forgotten that.

Negotiation was a process; it had tactics and patterns. He'd made this argument before, but always with Iverson roaring the world down, holding their place while the rest of the crew stripped through the data to find the point they needed.

_If I've made anything happen in the last couple years, it's because of my crew,_ he'd said elsewhere, in a hospital ward turned luminous with afternoon light. _I couldn't have made it this far without them._

But he could do this now. He could do this alone. Veronica had given him all the data they could use. All he needed was a chance to find the right words.

"Ashkeeper Zh'cari of the Plasi-veotrix System recognizes the third plenipotentiary of Earth."

Shiro jerked. Curtis had risen. His shoulders juddered beneath his uniform. His hands drew along the railing as if he were taking hold of the cannon controls. 

"Sir," he said, in a voice that shone like salt. "With all due respect, you haven't investigated the situation on the ground. We've been to Vro-Seiira-Geo. If you'd seen the way they handled the unrest a few weeks ago, you'd understand. They have a bad history, and they haven't gotten over it. We're making this offer because of what we saw on the planet. Anyone on our ship can tell you about it."

He hadn't used the standard Coalition courtesies. Shiro watched as Zh'cari marked it; its mazy eyes thrashed and strained against the ribs of its armour. "Anyone on your ship," it buzzed. "Whether or not they belong to the Atlas's crew?"

Curtis faltered. Shiro felt the tremor like a wire carving through his own bones. In five years, Curtis had held his place in the line: second officer, the bridge's munitions officer, one more body in the Garrison line as Shiro spoke to the universe. He'd never spoken for the Atlas before, or its proposals. He hadn't needed to.

 _Don't go off-script. We can't give them any leverage._

His fingers latched over Curtis's shoulder, sealing tight against his flinch. "Curtis," he breathed, unseeing. Thunder quaked between his ribs, a storm at its landing. "Sit down."

He turned away. Somewhere out of the corner of his eye, Curtis was staring, round-eyed; but he didn't have the time to answer it. "Sorry," Shiro said to the drifting platforms. "Things with Vro-Seiira-Geo are obviously a little complicated. But we'll be open to questions from interested parties after the summit. And we always welcome allies on the Atlas."

"Do you welcome the opportunity to allow your allies to settle their business with each other?" said Zh'cari.

No names crossed the air between them. They didn't have to. In the highest tiers of the platform, he felt Keith's shadow like a magnesium flare.

That was the trouble, Shiro thought, with politics. Every statement was a campaign, a minefield, an unsettled score. Across the platforms, heads were flittering to and fro, casting suspicion and new bets. Weighing the situation in the Blade of Marmora, on Vro-Seiira-Geo, and the prices that Earth might pay for them, if the chance ever came.

A datapad tapped the railing. 

Shiro lifted his head. Veronica gazed back. She touched her glasses, then flicked at the screen. The datapad leapt into a flurry, and struck onto a new page: _Establishing the Public Relationship Between Earth and Vro-Seiira-Geo_.

"You want to do the honours?" she said.

Slowly Shiro looked at her: the Atlas's chief analyst, mirror-eyed and tawny as a lion, sure of every letter she'd written. He pressed the datapad back towards her. "Why don't you take this one," he said.

Veronica nodded. There was no flinch in her shoulders as she faced forward, head drawn high, a banner to the universe.

"Before we conclude our motion. On behalf of Admiral Shirogane, the fourth plenipotentiary of Earth motions to extend our speaking time in accordance with the standard Coalition Conference Protocols. Article C-2h(l)(a), Section XR, subparenthesis (o)." She smiled, a carving light. "We'd like to clear a few things up."

  
  
  
  
  


It was full night on Zwaote by the time he left.

On record, the meeting had lasted eight hours. But discussions tended to linger on between bureaucrats. It was in the afterhours when the true work got done: after a long day of shared exhaust, steeping their bones in stories and bleak data from across the stars. The newer plenipotes, who still believed in setting work-home boundaries, let their guard down, and the career politicians went in for the kill.

Even then, Shiro thought, they hadn't gotten anywhere. Not one representative had asked about Vro-Seiira-Geo again.

The lamps had waned down to half-moons. The tiers were empty as their platform drifted down to the doors. Curtis and Sam had gone ahead hours ago, guiding the adjutants back to the ship. Only Veronica was left: ash-faced and mute, her arms prickling with dog-eared dossiers. 

Together they drifted through the corridors and out to the elevators.

He meant to follow her in; but some crackling, nameless current stopped him at the doors. He made his excuses in a stumbling reel—something easy and meaningless, forgotten as soon as it left him. One by one, the elevator locks clanked shut. Ventilators hissed; the chamber went whistling into the stars. 

In the dark, Shiro turned away.

It was later than he'd expected. The Coalition service hangars were still. The ship-bays shone, stripped and colourless, light hanging thin on the skeletal walls. The Zwaote patrols must have just changed shifts. There were only a handful of ships left to take: dented old models with bent wings and ticking engines, still slick with interstellar dust.

On a whim, Shiro chose a battered little scout-ship, rust-red and bristling with wings. Its authorisation scans swallowed his Coalition codes, and lit up. It'd been years since he'd been alone in a ship; but it didn't matter. He sank into the pilot's seat and the old routines sprawled open for him. Mechanical checks, takeoff trajectory calculations, all the parts and points that he'd learned as a cadet, spread across the control array of a new machine.

Years passed; dreams burned out; but this would never change.

He flew back to the Atlas in a glittering rush—loop into loop, a race against himself, for the sheer sake of it. Stars smeared through the hours. The moon dropped into the dark. There was only the flight path, the arch of the controls, the doors of a landing deck yielding like water. The scout swept across the deck floor in a reckless curve, thrusters flaring, hull shivering. The hangar's fields adjusted, and stabilised; the scout, hovering, touched down with inches to spare. Shiro felt its tremor down to his marrows. 

Through the haze of exhaust, the world was shining. 

He went out. The landing deck was empty. Only its screens stirred—pale, sleepless displays gleaming with an inexorable countdown. Five hours to reveille. The whole ship must be resting by now: Curtis, Veronica, Iverson, all the crew-members who trusted their lives to the Atlas's judgment. It was late, and they were spent; there was nothing left to do but dream.

A clank broke the hush.

Shiro started. In the farthest hangar, the corvette's doors lay open. A silhouette shifted in its hallway, narrow as a blade, steady on his feet.

"Keith," he said.

He was across the floor by the time Keith leaned out from his ship. "Shiro," he said, startled. "Hey. When'd you get back?"

For a moment he couldn't speak. The flight had hollowed something out of him, though he couldn't have named it if he'd tried. But a glance was enough. Light traced the scratches of Keith's Marmora armour. Shadows towered behind him, heaping in the ship's crooked hall as if against a siege.

"You're packing pretty heavy for a midnight snack run," Shiro said.

Keith looked at him. His gaze struck like a blade, or an echo. In the moment there seemed to be no difference. "I have to go," he said.

"Right now?"

"Zethrid got a line on some of her old smuggling contacts." Keith turned away. The sling of his shoulders flexed, clean as a knife's curve. "Their travel circuit runs pretty close to the Veniwar system. She thinks that she and Ezor can talk them into flying supplies out to Vro-Seiira-Geo for a while."

"You want to feed a whole planet with stolen goods," said Shiro.

"Not _stolen_ ," Keith said; but he didn't look back. "It's just for the next couple months. Once we buy them some time, we can think of something else."

The lean, corded strength of his arms, the way his hair curled against his nape, the turn of his wrists beneath his gloves like a promise. There'd been a reason that he hadn't looked for Keith at the summit. The sight of him was a lodestar. He couldn't look away now if he tried.

"Stop," Shiro said. The word wrenched through him. He pitched forward. His fingers dug against the door as Keith lifted his head. They held their places, bodies suspended, breaths catching between them like sparks. "It doesn't have to be like this, Keith."

"Like what?" Keith bit out. "They're not going to take it from people who need it. And we'll be giving it to people who _do_."

"Tell me you're sure about that."

"No one on Vro-Seiira-Geo's going to leave the planet." Each word flickered through his teeth like steel. "Even if we told everyone what was happening right now, they don't have the resources to go anywhere else. We don't have a _choice_ , Shiro."

The conviction of Keith's voice was a drawn red banner, inarguable. Shiro laughed in spite of himself, soft and raw, and felt the echo trembling in Keith's fists. "Things aren't exactly going the way we planned, are they?"

"Does anything?"

"Hey. Speak for yourself. I still remember how to put together a plan or two." He leaned in—felt the hitch in Keith's body as his palm slid over his nape, as their heads bowed together. "Keith—listen to me. Veronica and I were talking about it during the meeting. Earth has a few long-standing deals for goods and services across the Coalition. Some of them are in systems pretty close. We can start bringing Vro-Seiira into some of those arrangements. Give some of our distant trading partners a subsidy if they'll let Vro-Seiira-Geo handle part of our contract services. In exchange, Vro-Seiira can take some of the supplies that they'd owe us."

"That sounds," Keith said, ragged, "complicated."

His smile flickered, a firefly light. "I won't lie to you. It's going to take longer than our original plan. But Vro-Seiira-Geo's odds of getting another planet into a long-term trade deal are going to go down a lot if people think they can't operate inside the system. They need a deal that they can build on. Something that can last long after we're gone."

Keith said, "Was that Veronica's idea? Or yours?"

Shiro swallowed. This close, Keith seemed to saturate everything. His dark, prickling lashes; the bow of his mouth; the faint, heady scent of him in the ship's shadows, armour and skin and bitter exhaust. "Both of ours," he said. "I'll be there for every negotiation, Keith, I swear we'll make it—"

"That's not what I meant," Keith said, "and you know it."

It caught him like a lightning bolt. His skin prickled all over with the charge. "I don't."

"You told me before that this was where you were supposed to be," Keith said. "But ever since I got here, everything you do's about meetings and paperwork. Every idea we talk about comes down to _maybe we can help if we try hard enough_. Was this always how you wanted things to go?"

Shiro laughed, or tried to; the sound crackled on his tongue. "We have one bad summit presentation, and you want to talk about what I want from life."

"You matter a lot more than the summit," Keith said. "And you've looked like that for a long time."

"'Like that'," Shiro echoed. "You mean, busy?"

"I mean _tired_ ," said Keith.

Every murmur was a touch. Their rhythm pulsed through him, hot as adrenaline, as a hand under cotton sheets in the dark. Shiro flushed, then bit it back. "What exactly are you asking me, Keith?"

"I'm asking," Keith said. His voice faltered, unraveling. "If you changed your mind, I guess. You didn't get to space by following the rules. We didn't take down the Empire because they _let_ us. The system was wrong back then, and it's still wrong now. You know that. So what's different now?"

His throat flexed, dry and empty. Memory sang through his bones. The loop and wild tumbling of warship manoeuvres in space. The way his whole body had resounded, once, with the thrum of a lion's starry voice. It blazed in his spine and through his fingertips, a light in every vein.

And then it went out.

"Maybe you're right," Shiro said. "Maybe I changed."

Keith breathed out. "Are you happy?"

He was too close. Tension rolled through the arch of his nape, gleaming against Shiro's palm like a coal draped in gauze. "I know it's hard to believe," Shiro said. "The Coalition's still a long way from perfect. But it's not going to get any better if people don't work to fix it. And if you think that's worth something—there's a place here for you." 

"What?"

Shiro laughed. Startlement had lit through Keith's face; he shone with it, open as a hearthfire. "Veronica keeps telling me that we need someone new on the bridge," he said. "And she's right. Our crew's some of the best in the Garrison—but none of us were trained for intergalactic relations. We need someone who can lead these summits. Someone who has experience in other star systems, who knows what to say when we're talking about policy that could affect entire galaxies. Someone who isn't afraid to move outside the standing regulations when we get the chance to make real, meaningful change."

"I don't," Keith said. "I don't think I'm the one you want for that."

"Why not? You'd be good at it. And I'm not as spry as I used to be. I could use you here." Even the thought was heady—Keith's arm brushing his at the admiral's battle-station. Standing before the Coalition with Keith's hand at his back. A leader, a paladin whose dreams still echoed with a lion's battle-roar. Everything that the Atlas had ever needed. "You have no idea," Shiro said, "what it's been like without you."

Silence swayed around them. Keith lifted his chin. The distance was a helpless flame between their mouths, burning and beating. "I've got another idea," he said. "Come with me."

"What?"

The words belled in his ears, echoing, flooding out the night—but Keith went on. "You said that you still wanted to help Vro-Seiira-Geo. Right? They're not going to need you to figure out a subsidy in the next couple weeks. So—"

" _Stop_."

He'd stumbled backwards—caught the doorframe before he went tumbling out to the hangar. They stared at each other across a distance like a sinking shore. "I can't," Shiro said. "I can't leave the Atlas again."

"Why _not_?"

They'd had this conversation before. His throat still carried the echoes of it, its rhythm and wounded flavour. His eyes ground shut; but still he couldn't seem to move. "I can't be that selfish, Keith. They need me here."

"I know that," Keith said.

Steps whispered across steel. Keith's hand settled on his shoulder. The heat of him brimmed over like morning light.

"I know they need you," Keith said, slowly. "But everyone's always going to need you. This isn't a choice between being selfish or being fair. No matter where you are, no matter what you choose—you're going to change the universe, Shiro. You always have. So, if it were just up to you—what would you want to _do_?"

Shiro opened his eyes. 

Keith hadn't stirred. His body was tilting close, his eyes turned sharp with stars.

On instinct, Shiro reached out. His fingers curved across Keith's cheek, tilting up his chin. A startled swallow flickered against his knuckles, impossibly yielding.

_Stop_ , he'd meant, _before I do something unforgivable_.

He wasn't thinking. He was. Every part of him was drawing close, easy as gravity. Keith's dark hair swayed over the curve of his hand; his mouth parted like drowning. "Shiro," he said, and Shiro kissed him, breathing deep.

There was nothing else. The kiss swept through him, an impact like dawn breaking across the universe. It remade him, undid him, left him frantic and shuddering. Through the gasp of Keith's mouth into his, the world was filmy with visions. Keith's face turned up to his beneath a cluster of festival lanterns. The halo of his body heat in a deserted hall. The rare, unforgivable sweetness of his smile seen through desert light.

He had never dreamt of this. He'd been dreaming of nothing but this.

Kiss slid into kiss, each brighter than the last. They went stumbling together. Keith's arm jarred the wall, and Shiro's grip closed over his hip, steadying, as he pressed him back. "Shiro," Keith panted, and it was _right_ , the fever-drunk echo on Keith's lips, his teeth, all the heart of him slipped into a breath like a secret.

They didn't stop. Keith's fingers dug into his lapels, smoothing down to his waist in a single greedy stroke, knotting in the bottom of his jacket to haul him close. The whole universe seemed to turn on an axis of instinct: salt and bruising, the brush of Keith's chest against his, heartbeats thundering fit to crack the world apart.

"Keith," he was saying, low and helplessly urgent, as Keith's teeth scraped skin, as his tongue laved over the feverish sting and his hand closed over Shiro's, a grip as tight as gold. "Keith, I—"

Silence struck him like a weight to the chest.

The kiss split apart. Shiro stopped, drawing back. Something in the catch of his breath must have translated. Keith's fist shivered against his hip, then fell away. His mouth was still slick, bruising-hot. He didn't speak.

Visions scattered through him like stars into seawater. He could explain himself, or pretend, or touch Keith again. But he had done enough damage. There was nothing that he could offer, now, to make this better.

"Sorry," Shiro said at last. His throat prickled with echoes: salt, gasping, the throb of Keith's pulse resounding down through his ribs. His left hand glittered at his side, colder with every beat. He couldn't think of anything else to say. "I—Sorry."

He twisted away. The landing deck was stark and bare. Keith's gaze rode on his shoulders like coals all the way across the floor; but no call came, and he didn't look back.

  
  
  
  
  


By morning, the corvette was gone.

Late in the day, Shiro flicked through the flight logs, sifting through the scrawled cagebar rows for the serial number of Keith's ship; the search was an afterthought. He knew Keith. He would have worn steadily through the night, shunting boxes into the cargohold, waiting for the ship systems to authorise his exit. Of the flight plan that he'd filed with the autonav, only the first thousand miles would be true. He wouldn't have stopped. Only in the pilot's seat, as the stars flowed into view, would he have let himself breathe. His shoulders sinking, his dark head bowed over the console, rubbing his knuckle over the flush of his lip.

But he couldn't think about that.

Days filtered by. Shiro drifted from meeting to meeting, through jumbles of stars and stray signals. Now and then, a pang would curl between his ribs—rootless, seething, always gone before he could pin a name to it.

It didn't matter. Mile by mile, the Atlas went on. From a distance, he felt the echoes of the larger universe. Acxa's sword-steel voice flicking up from Veronica's station. Ensigns reading out new trade proposals with the jagged, unmistakable accents of a Vesh official. People spoke to him, and he answered them. Every step was an act of survival. In motion, nothing could haunt him. He would wake and work—would drift, and keep drifting. When he slept, he dreamt of nothing at all.

  
  
  
  
  


"Their ID beacon is mismatched," the adjutant said, later.

The words had the weight of an echo. Tanaka, he thought, with uninflected guilt—Veronica's favourite of the adjutants, whose trim reports always came with a binder of carefully researched footnotes. They'd come to see him half an hour ago; they must have been delivering this report steadily since. "Sorry," Shiro said, focusing. "Why does the beacon matter?"

"Because, sir, the ship has been logged in the model registry," Tanaka said. Their voice drew out, thin as lace under the fraying night. "Its record shows that its last landing inside the Coalition was abroad the Atlas. It left five days ago. But that is not the ID beacon of the record. Protocol says, when the ID beacon shown is not the same as what is recorded, then the pilot must provide the standard forms of Coalition ID before they can be allowed to board."

"And he isn't doing that."

"Yes. They are refusing us."

Shiro lifted his head. A ship carved across the screens. For a moment, he couldn't piece it together—its black metal, its thorny, savaging wings, the sleek undercurve of its belly and its fading stripes splotched with rust. Every inch of it was a landmark, a waypoint. "This is the ship in orbit right now," he said. "Are you sure?"

"Sir," Tanaka said, with a glimmer of impatience. "It is an ongoing broadcast."

Shiro stared. A sound leapt in his throat, then settled. Every nerve and vein of him was shuddering with a wardrum roar. "I'm authorising an override," he said. "Whoever else needs to sign off on that decision, get them. And tell the ship to dock now."

"I see. Should we keep its registration under the Blade of Marmora?"

Halfway to the doors, Shiro twitched a glance backwards. The corvette hung in every screen, galvanic, incandescent, like the dissection of a storm. A laugh thudded in his bones, every breath a wingbeat. "Whatever works," he said.

He tore down to the hangars. The landing doors were still grinding apart as he caught the frame's edge. The air shivered with alchemical static as gravity crystallised across the deck. The corvette looked no worse for its travels—battered but quick, its dark wings glowing in the same flensing patterns. But there was a strangeness in the way it skimmed across the floor: economical with its graces, nothing like Keith's knifing, radiant turns.

The ship's doors rolled open. The gangplank eased into the hangar. A silhouette moved through the jaws of the ship. His grizzled shoulders hunched against the downpour of light.

"Kolivan," said Shiro, blankly.

Kolivan's gaze swung up. The years seemed to touch him lightly now—as if the war had coarsened him, stripped him down to a shape past changing. "It's good to see you, Admiral," he said. His fur'd been cropped short, and the ash in his voice had thinned; but he still descended with the iron surety of a weapon. "I appreciate your help in landing."

"What?" The words flickered through him. _Landing_ tasted like nothing but shrapnel. "That's not a problem, but Keith's—you just missed him. He left about a week ago."

Kolivan looked back with gold-eyed intent. "I'm aware," he said. "I met with Keith some few days ago. He was—insistent. He notified me that you knew that I was retiring from the Blades. He said that you might have another use for me."

"I—" Shiro said, and stopped.

He understood, then. 

_We need someone who can lead these summits,_ he'd told Keith. _Someone who has experience in other star systems, who knows what to say when we're talking about policy that could affect entire galaxies. Someone who isn't afraid to move outside the standing regulations when we get the chance to make real, meaningful change._

A week was no time at all for the distance that lay between the Atlas's current flight circuit and the Blade of Marmora. Keith must have flown without rest to make it. He'd crossed light-years, carrying those words, to bring Shiro this chance.

"Admiral."

He started, and turned. Curtis stared back. The corner of his collar was pricking his chin, lopsided and quizzical. "Tanaka told me that you needed another sign-off for the flight authorisation protocol," he said. "Should ... I ask what's going on?"

In the stillness, Shiro looked at him with new clarity—his rumpled sleeves, his dark eyes as sheer as saltwater. Curtis looked undone: as raw-boned and uncertain in the hangar as he'd been on the summit platform, fumbling to answer the plenipotentiary of Vesh. But that was unfair. Curtis had gone to the summit because Shiro'd called him to it. He had never asked to be second officer of the Atlas. He'd never asked for anything but an end to war, and a marriage that he could come home to.

_If it were just up to you, Shiro—what would you want to do?_

His heartbeat pounded, bright as adamantine.

"Curtis," Shiro said, rough and slow. "We should talk."

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> happy boxing day! this is the end of act 2, so i'll be taking a two-week break between updates. see you on jan. 8, 2021.


	9. Chapter 9

  
  
  
  
  


… there’s no pure  
way to say it. _The wind blows and it makes  
a noise. Pain makes a noise. We bang on  
the pipes and it makes a noise. Was there  
no one else?_ His hands keep turning into  
birds, and his hands keep flying away  
from him. _Eventually the birds must land._

 _ _— richard siken, "unfinished duet".__

 _ ___

 _ ___

  
  
  
  
  


_  
___  
Weeks swept by like tides.

Kolivan had served in two forces through his lifetime. Neither had been designed for human survival. But military institutions had a way of growing into the same forms. Kolivan fitted himself into the Atlas's hierarchy, easy as a soldier who'd cut his fangs on mortars. He learned the maintenance schedules, and kept them. He trailed each department head through their daily routines, looming until their reports spilled out like confessions. He'd burned decades in leading the universe's last rebellion to endless war. By comparison, management of a single ship was nothing. 

He took the promotion without ceremony or pride. His skill spoke for itself. That seemed to make all the difference. If any gossip had risen after Curtis's slingshot transfer out of the bridge, no one had dared to cast it around where Kolivan could hear it.

Even kindnesses took time to forgive when they came unwanted. What he'd done had been kind to no one but himself. 

So Shiro set new alarms; he slept on the antechamber sofa, and woke alone. Through the grey stretches of his shifts, he watched as the Atlas remade itself. The long train of proposed regulations wended their way into the judicial department, and a shorter train came curling out. Calls which once demanded the attendance of the Atlas's full-fledged crew were pared down to a few departmental officers, acting under Iverson's disgruntled oversight. ("I never should've let you graduate, Shirogane!" he growled in passing, as two adjutants lugged policy binders behind him.) And Veronica went on: drafting holoprints, swiping junior officers from other departments, tearing intergalactic maps apart in search of a planet that would balance Vro-Seiira-Geo.

Most of his day, now, came down to Kolivan and Sam.

Kolivan could look at the Atlas's hierarchy with an outsider's eye. He could smooth its transition from a military organisation to an agency with its own autonomy. He could terrorise a domineering plenipote into silence with a brief, branding stare. But he couldn't sketch out the relationships that were vital to the functions of the Atlas's first officer overnight.

Luckily, there was a simple solution to that, too. Sooner or later, everyone who lived on an alchemical ship talked to its engineers.

"Ninety percent of the job's playing connect-the-dots," Sam told Kolivan under Shiro's bemused eye. 

They had taken up the empty station on the bridge. It was a good place for Kolivan to start. Only adjutants visited the bridge after-hours, and the Atlas's cannons hadn't seen use in years. It was strange to look over and see the old screens busy as a new tidepool, brimming with code and system scans, where Curtis had kept his station quiet. But there was a relief to it, too: Kolivan, drawing in all the light, holding the hours in place.

"Somebody in engineering might be assigned to update the cryptography on the ship's civilian channels," said Sam, shoulder nudging Kolivan's. "That sounds like busywork to them, so they deprioritise the project. Month after that, medical starts seeing a rise in family-related stress. Now, the medics don't know why. Neither does anybody in engineering. But once you've got all the pieces, it's easier for someone to catch that half the crew's calls home aren't making it through."

"For that to work," Kolivan said, "these matters would need to be reported."

"Most of 'em are," Sam said. His knuckles clicked together—the same old tic from his lecturing days. "Every now and then you'll get officers skimping a little on the technical details—but we've been busy. I try to ask for holoprints. Means that people have an excuse to drop by my station and fill me in. Some of your work's pretty cut-and-dried analysis, though. Take a look at this, for instance—"

The instruction hadn't been meant for him. Still, Shiro looked up. A wind-wheel of a report spiraled open across the bridge's monitors. Alien characters traced along a circle of dense, intricate categories and designations. Pixels guttered; the translators sang long and low, parsing the data.

"That is the most recent list of authorised bounties across the Coalition," Kolivan said. His gaze drew down the wheel. "Is there any action required from the Atlas?"

"Not in most cases. Earth doesn't set bounties, as a rule. And Veronica hates 'em for overcomplicating extraterritorial jurisdiction. But these notices usually come with ship data. Tracking ship designations can help you keep an eye on the relationships between systems."

"I've noticed that. A concentration of bounties against old imperial ships in one area could lead the Atlas to an undiscovered base of Galra soldiers."

Sam tweaked at his glasses, then his moustache. "Sure," he said. "Or a merchant fleet might file bounties against a rival who's been trying to outprice them inside their home system. Bounties don't come cheap; but the trials are usually a pain in the keister. That kind of leverage keeps merchants from trying anything too funny. So I hear, anyway."

They kept talking—trading war stories, sorrowing together over the strange commercial practices of these modern youths. Shiro watched the bounty list as its translations flooded the screens: rows of ship designations tagged with grainy, blotted snapshots of alien ships. Scouts, skiffs, warships turned to a new purpose—

"Sam," he heard himself say. "Bring up one of the listings for me. Fifth column. Third cell down."

His voice struck the bridge like a stone into water. 

Kolivan moved first. His heavy fingers thudded along the console, pulling the mottled image into clarity. A black-lined troopship, its belly carved with violet stripes. "Bounty recorded for each of the five members aboard the ship _Vrepit Shut Your Mouth_." His echo belled through the stations, so austere that not one officer laughed. "The crew travels under a host of names. They are cautioned to be armed and dangerous. Their crimes are terrorism, threats to civil aviation, and unregulated trade of contraband."

Sam whistled, a cheerful little chirp. "That last one could mean anything," he said. His gaze lingered on his own station monitor. "Everything's contraband somewhere. What's the bounty for all five?"

Kolivan's hand swept the screen—slow, but with a pilot's precision. "I will set the conversion rate."

This took some time. Sam kicked his chair over to Kolivan's station, scrawling shorthand for Earth's scattered currencies. Numbers whirled across the screen. Whistles flickered, rising like echoes, as officers caught sight of the total.

"Are those today's rates?" said Sam.

"They are," said Kolivan. "I have seen planets ransomed for less."

Sam murmured, sifting through the data. Images sprawled across the screens, all composite sketches and grimy snapshots. Even before he lifted his head, Shiro knew what he would see.

"Huh," said Sam into the hush. "That sure explains the price."

Pictures had never suited Keith. Something always slipped out of translation—a sharpness, a gravity, all the constellated light of him flattened into faraway colour. But there was a new strangeness about the figure moving through the photographs. Shadows had deepened the bruisy hollows beneath his eyes. His scar strained red across his cheek. He moved with his armour as if it were a second skin, with bitter, hard-edged grace.

He'd had time to regret what he'd done to Keith; and still the vision flashed through him like a match dropped into oil.

Shiro turned his head. "I guess news from the summit got around," he said. "Someone's testing to see if Earth's going to stand behind Keith, if it comes down to it."

"Then they don't know much about humans," said Sam.

He couldn't look up. Still, Shiro reached across his own screen. He traced the unfamiliar characters, all the shining curves as stark as signal-fires. "No," he said. "They really don't."

  
  
  
  
  


Five years ago, a rescue would have taken coordinates and a single good cause. But those had been lawless days, when the only lights that he'd had to guide him were a lion's eyes and endless war.

Shiro had learned. He'd grown, and slowed, and let himself settle. He knew better now.

He sketched out the mission plan over a handful of days. It'd been years since he'd drawn up a proposal without an adjutant. But no Garrison officer would have understood what he meant. This couldn't be an ordinary search. There was a formula underneath the shortcuts that Keith would carve from star to star. There always was. A way to sift the systems, and find the points that might draw Keith down to land.

In this, as in so many other things, there was no teaching someone else how to follow the flow of Keith's thoughts. Shiro understood, and that was all. He knew it the way his body knew gravity.

Even if he couldn't trust himself, he could trust that.

The work crawled through every hour, ink-fingered and aching. Shiro fumbled through the translated maps, cutting the localised units down to miles and hours. Line by line, he measured out the fuel and credits to each mission-ship. In the dark, he wove loose and dreaming rings across all the maps that he'd memorised, circling the fuel-stations in range of Keith's last-known position until he sank into empty rest.

  
  
  
  
  


In the end, he found Veronica at her station, Kolivan braced over her screen like a battlement leaning over a courtyard. They turned together, listening as Shiro went through the steps of his plan, every map marked down to the mile.

Veronica canted her head as he finished; her fingers curled up her hair. "Okay," she said, with her usual measured attention. "Do you want an honest opinion on the plan? Or do you want the answer that makes it easier for you to move on with the decision you've already made?"

"Really appreciate how you've framed that," said Shiro.

"I've been reading up on dual-use export provisions all day," said Veronica. "Revising this directive might actually be a death sentence. I'm fried. If you don't want plain talking, you're gonna have to go somewhere else." 

"I promise," Shiro said. "That's all I want."

Veronica straightened. "Right," she said. Restlessness jolted through the tensing bow of her wrists. "So far, the setup sounds like you're walking me through a list of reasons why the Atlas _shouldn't_ go looking for Keith."

"Since when do we need a reason to do the right thing?" 

"Keith's part of the Blade of Marmora," Veronica said. At her side, Kolivan shifted with the voiceless unease of an eclipse. "So he's way outside of the Garrison's jurisdiction. We have no idea where he is, and using the Atlas to search for him would mean drawing the Coalition's attention to areas that probably don't want our help. Where exactly is the _pro_ column in this pro-con list?"

His throat worked, thick and hot, clotted with empty air. "No matter what he's involved with," Shiro said, "Keith's still a citizen of Earth. The Garrison should have the authority to keep him out of a _bounty trial_."

Veronica sank back. Her glasses shone, filmy as distant fires. "Lance can still fly, you know," she said.

Shiro looked at her. He didn't speak.

"Hunk has a whole book of intergalactic contacts by now," said Veronica. "Or he should—he's been building it up ever since he opened for business. You can even squeeze a few non-Coalition contacts out of him if you lean a little. And I hear Pidge is building prototypes for a drone fleet that's designed for exactly this type of search."

"What," said Shiro, "is your point, Veronica?"

"I _know_ you like getting involved," Veronica said. She touched her mouth—a transparent gesture, pinning back a frown. "Normally that's a good thing. You care more than anyone else in the Garrison; people respond to that. But Shiro—caring about the cause means that you need to know when to pull back, too."

"You're telling me to give up."

"I'm telling you that the Atlas isn't designed for search-and-rescue missions. If you don't want to use non-Garrison resources, that's fine. The MFE unit's full of pilots who were trained for this." But she stopped, then. The tide of her mouth swept back a smile. "I know," said Veronica, "that nothing I say's actually going to change your mind. So before we go plunging into the final frontier, I just want to be clear on what's happening here. Why do _you_ have to be the one who finds Keith?"

"He's my—" 

The words flew through him, unguarded. All these years, all this space, and he hadn't unlearned this—this reflex, this helpless, seething adrenaline. This part of him that would always answer the sound of Keith's name like a needle swinging north.

"Keith's your friend," Veronica said at last. He felt her gaze stretching through him, measuring the gap between his voice and what he'd let slip through. "I understand what that means to you. You're not an easy person to get close to. People still tell stories about the legendary bonds between the paladins of Voltron. How they made all of you stronger; how it saved us all. But the last summit showed that those bonds can be used _against_ you. Whoever set up that bounty? They're expecting us to go after Keith. Even if we do find him this time—you know it's going to happen again. Next time, the trap won't be something that the Atlas can fly in and out of. There's only one way that this works out for all of us."

Around them, the bridge was still—still as ice, still as staging. "That being?" Shiro said.

"If we find Keith," Veronica said, "and he stays with us. On the Atlas."

_If he stays._

He'd thought of it before the summit, and again the night after, all of his reasons teeming through him like fever. Keith dressed in Garrison colours, his hands curling over the Atlas's controls, the glint of his head under space-light. Safe with him—safe at last. The vision still curled between his ribs; but the ache of it had lessened over time. Shiro breathed, and felt its weight settle: no heavier than a summer dream, a saltwater burn.

_Every time I look back, I just think—I need to keep going. I never want to stop. Shiro, do you get that?_

His throat ached. Memory shuddered in his veins. All these years, and there was still only one answer in him.

"I agree with the lieutenant," Kolivan said. 

Shiro started. Kolivan shifted, slow and deliberate, arms drawn across his chest, smoothing over all the danger of himself. "This is not a matter for the Atlas's intervention," he said. "However, a reasonable compromise exists. I believe my paperwork to join the crew is expected to remain in processing for several weeks. Until the process is complete, I will lead the search for Keith alone. If it is appropriate."

Veronica rubbed her thumb along her jaw. She glanced over. Light prickled beneath her lashes; if the paperwork's delay hadn't been expected before, it was now. "I guess it's up to our fearless leader," she said.

For no reason at all, Shiro thought of the crew-members who'd drawn themselves together on the morning that he left for Vro-Seiira-Geo. Cadets, fog-eyed engineers, and communications officers trimmed into a row, all starch and winking polish, bright as the first dawn at sea. 

Everything had been easier then.

He hadn't needed to bring this to Veronica. Protocol didn't require that; but somewhere along the way, he'd come to the habit and never stopped. A pilot, looking at a ship, could not help but see the points where it might be drawn into flight. But Veronica had never been a pilot. She saw the functions of the Atlas, its limits and its reserves. Nothing could sway her judgment.

"All right," Shiro said, thin as rust. A thought was burning behind the backs of his eyes; he pressed it aside, and went on. "Kolivan—I'm not in a position to give you orders, so I'll stick to recommendations. Try to call in every twenty hours while you're still traveling. If you need back-up for any reason, you retreat to the safest position you can hold, and reach out to the Atlas immediately. Hold that position until backup arrives."

Kolivan's head bent. His fist clenched against his shoulder, the habit like a scar, before he remembered himself. "Admiral," he said, and let it fall.

In this, as in so many other things—but he had been wrong before. Shiro swallowed, and bowed his head in turn. "Good luck," he said.

  
  
  
  
  


Kolivan flew out at first dawn in a generic scout-ship. Veronica disappeared three days after.

He saw her in hallways still, carrying holoprints, her shoulders pinched with starch and her head a crown of tufts. In the bridge she didn't falter from her station; her keying fingers kept a rhythm as bright as chrome. But something had shifted in the last few days, or was shifting still. Veronica was busy with Vro-Seiira-Geo. She was recalibrating Curtis's vanishing out of the station across from hers. She had started to shift some of her own duties to Kolivan, and now was staggering under the load of them again. She was a ghost, a figment of bureaucracy, and she looked no one in the eye.

There were a dozen reasons for it; there were always reasons on the Atlas. But Shiro knew her enough to understand the sequence that awaited him. He would ask, and she would lie. He'd reach out and she'd drift out of the way—further, farther, until all that was left of their conversations was history, policy, and the Atlas.

He'd given her enough to deal with. He couldn't ask her to take his guilt, too.

So he let Veronica measure out the distance between them. He took her reports, and smiled when she spun out an old line. And Shiro watched the arc of Kolivan's ship carving through the stars.

No one could match Keith in flight; but given good information and the right conditions, a skilled pilot could trace him. Through Kolivan's reports, he saw the lightning trail of Keith's path through an asteroid system, the slingshot turns that he yoked around dwarf stars. Kolivan flew out to abandoned colonies, waystations, salvage-gardens which branched out to silvery gravitational rings. Shiro pinned point after point across the maps like an astronomer in wait, sketching constellations.

He didn't tell Curtis.

There had always been things that they didn't talk about. After the war, he couldn't have lived with anything else. He wasn't twenty-two anymore, flush with supernova ambition, yearning for someone else to set his limits for him and call it love. He had been a paladin, a revenant, steel in the blade that had cut down the Galra Empire. There were stories that he could afford to lock away now, ghosts that deserved to rest in their graves. 

Curtis had understood that. The battlefield was behind them, and they had survived.

Days eddied by, aimless, endless. Two weeks after Curtis's promotion to the head of munitions, they were speaking again. Three days after, Shiro came stumbling into the antechamber after a long shift to find Curtis on the anteroom sofa, waiting to bring him to bed. Forgiveness, or something like it, for everything he could bring himself to admit. 

It would have to be enough. He'd already sent Curtis away once: out of the bridge, into the highest reaches of the Atlas where all its weapons lay at rest. This was the foundation for the rest of his life. He couldn't turn it down.

Days and days, a tide of ever-changing days. Reports flurried through his console at all hours. They wound along his console as he worked through his shifts on the bridge, a sheer cascade of messages from all across the stars. Their lights swept through the backs of his eyes in the dreaming dark, sparks straining on the brink of burning.

> _**19859208.003.014** \- The Vrepit Shut Your Mouth was logged at the Dazakni checkpoint on the outskirts of the Knezed system eight days ago. Fuel was purchased. It seems to be traveling in the direction of the sunless scavenger colonies._
> 
>  _ **19859208.003.015** \- A correction to previous statements. On further investigation, Vrepit appears to have paid for two ships to refuel at Dazakni, not one. Its unidentified flyer departed the day after Vrepit's crew. The flyer's ultimate destination is unknown. Its surveillance image is attached, as last recorded. _
> 
> _**19859208.003.017** \- An alarm was raised six days ago at the Juruz junkyard for an unidentified black flyer. Another customer had supposedly been trading refugee labour for fuel. A conflict occurred. The other customer's cargohold was damaged. Repairs are ongoing. The flyer left no flight plan_.

  
Every day, a new mystery out of the deeps. None of them were messages; but they were as close as he could hope to come.

By coincidence, there was a lull in the bridge when the next report came. Shiro parsed its thorny sentences, then drew open the area maps. Galaxies sifted through his fingers. Projections rose out of their pinprick lights; they swept the gridded planes of space, winding the endless stars in a wild, circling maze.

No, he thought. Not wild.

He touched the console. Kolivan's coordinates brimmed across his screen like a shore surfacing from beneath the morning tide. The ansible thrummed with light.

"Admiral," said Kolivan, dusty with the distance of light-years. "I wasn't expecting your response for another six hours."

"Duty doesn't sleep," Shiro said. He meant it as a joke; but the smile didn't come. He swallowed, and tasted coffee rusting at the back of his throat. "How are you doing out there?"

"I refueled recently at a Coalition waypoint," Kolivan said. His voice droned through the speakers, breaking across the bridge like dawn. "The ship is equipped to travel for at least fifteen more days. I would estimate that it will take three to locate a usable backtrace again."

"Any idea about his mission yet? It didn't look like there was much out there."

"The systems in this area are somewhat desolate. Most of the Empire's mining focused here before the end of the war," said Kolivan. "You've been reviewing the maps."

It was a Galra habit, he knew; but there was something military in that hard, dry voice, the presentation of facts as a question. "I wanted to make sure that there wasn't anything out there that might surprise you," said Shiro. "I know you're used to working with more backup."

"There's nothing in this area that I hadn't expected. I've moved into a detour route in order to avoid being traced by the local bounty-hunters. No interference should be necessary. Bringing the Atlas to this area would increase the level of interest without defusing it."

"But you think something's wrong."

Light whirled across the transmission screen, the silhouette of a breath caught in static. "I'm unable to understand his purpose," said Kolivan. "He's landed at every waystation for several systems around. Even accounting for his style of flying, he can't be losing fuel as often as he's docked for it."

Shiro closed his eyes. His pulse pounded through his temples, in the strut of his wrist, mazy and clear at once. "Do we know what he's doing at the stations?"

"Speaking with other pilots," Kolivan said. "Mostly."

"Mostly?"

"Traditionally, daily conversations do not require so many knives," Kolivan said, with the bleakness of a man who'd overseen Keith's work for three years. "I would suggest that it was an information-gathering expedition. But the information that he gains in this area is unlikely to benefit his ship. The _Vrepit_ has been logged at a station several light-years away. Whatever his mission, it is unlikely to relate to his crew's."

He didn't know. He couldn't know. But the way to Keith had always been simpler than reason.

Shiro watched himself, moving: paging into the maps he'd marked, striping over the ribboning loops of the Coalition's trading routes and checkpoints, the scattered blots where the wormholes gaped dark and hungry. He traced his way from station to station, mapping all the points that Keith had been, and kept going. The station stopped; but the pattern held, light after light coiling down to a single gleaming system.

He breathed, tasting desert rust and stripped green skies. The hush shone through him like the air of a shrine.

"Get back as fast as you can," Shiro said, low and resolute. "We're about to move into a new project. The ship's going to need all hands on deck for the next few weeks."

"I see," said Kolivan, after a moment. "Is the mission closed?"

In motion, nothing could haunt him. But the world had gone still around him, and in the morning light, he could feel the station beating with the shadow of a space where Keith had held his own.

"No," Shiro said. He drew the maps wide, letting the barriers of Veniwar flood through every screen. "I know where he's going."

  
  
  
  
  


"You rang?" Veronica said. "You know we have encrypted channels for after-hours communications, right?"

Shiro turned. Monitor-lights spumed across the floor between them in tides of silver, blue, green. "Feels like it's been a while since we talked in person," he said. "Thanks for coming to see me."

The doors murmured shut. Her mouth curled; her lashes dipped in an artless sweep. She might have never been to a diplomatic conference, never reordered a Garrison ship into terrifying productivity, never lived on anything but caffeine and sheer brass nerve.

"Well," said Veronica, light as an echo. "No points for guessing who this is about."

She made her way down to the battle-stations. Night had swept over the bridge, sweeping the ship into its maintenance processes. Lamps burned like platinum chips. System scans jittered across the console screens, windows swinging in a firework frenzy. He felt the chemical resonance through his lungs, the rhythm of alchemy and ship-steel.

Across the floor, Veronica's shoulders eased under the same long-learned cadence.

"I've been reading the reports you put together while I was gone. I think there's something that you're not saying," Shiro said. The quiet resisted his voice; but he spoke through it. "And I think it's about Curtis."

Veronica cocked her head. "Hm," she said. "I guess that's negative points to me."

"Veronica."

"Sir," said Veronica, and turned. Her salute carved the air, neat as iron.

"The Atlas oversaw the final stages of the Ghau-yei Cooperative's system census while I was out," Shiro said, slowly. Veronica used bureaucracy as she used everything else: a shield, a sword, and shelter when it suited her. He could not tell by her face which this was meant to be. "After that—you guys flew out to the Sachronfa system. Right? Sachronfa's been talking for the last year about wanting Coalition representatives to witness the contract bidding ceremony for their new warptech infrastructure. I told them at the last summit that we'd try to make it."

"Right," Veronica said, steady-eyed. "And we kept the promise."

That was an answer of a kind, though not to the question that he'd meant. A Garrison officer owed certain duties to her crew: regulation, secrecy, loyalty. She couldn't give them up for anything less than the right command.

Questions bloomed in his lungs: what he'd missed, what she thought she'd gain by twisting protocol, how things had ever come to this. Shiro held them all for a beat, two. He breathed out. "Did the Ghau-yei," he said instead, "get what they needed?"

Veronica stiffened. Her gaze raked across the stations. Shiro held his place. 

Move and countermove. He knew the game by now; but he didn't have to play it.

Her head bent. She traced her private codes into her station, spinning up old system maps. "We were at the Ghau-yei's census because they specifically asked Earth to show up. Remember? At the summit last year?"

He followed the maps. Planets whirled through the screens like a parade of comets. Their orbits unraveled into pictures: gold continents and red water, old Galra signal-towers left to moss and rust, banners splashed across a horizon as tender as parchment. In the wake of the war, the Ghau-yei Cooperative lived as if every step were a legacy. Their rebuilding was a slow and stately process. They strengthened the old buildings that the Galra hadn't destroyed, and razed only those which they did not want to leave for their children. They talked with an inhuman clarity: sharp but gentle, cat-eyed with every syllable. Rumour had it that the Ghau-yei were schooled not to forget, the way human children were taught to run.

"Right," Shiro said, watching the screens. "We thought it was a pretty standard request. The more Coalition representatives show up to your events, the more important you look."

"That's what everyone thought. But I've been going over the timeline lately, and I get the impression they had a different angle." Up rose a swarm of reports, reeling with pages. "Last year was the same year that the Coalition got a proposal to revise the Coalition Charter. They wanted a new carve-out clause, excluding anyone with more than half-Galra blood from the definition of 'natural person'."

The Ghau-yei hadn't been one of them, he remembered. They'd had nothing to do with the discussions, and had voted with the majority once the tide had drawn out far enough to see the writing along the shore. But intrigue had a way of tangling stars flung light-years apart.

Shiro craned over his console. The charts and statistics stirred and shifted around his searching fingertips. The Ghau-yei were neither explorers nor mediators by trade; but twenty-five percent of their population had reported at least one Galra parent in the last three generations. Their previous census had been put out four years ago in an uneasy furor: the Coalition mapping out peacetime like a conqueror, desperate to understand the worlds who'd fallen into its care.

Across the Coalition, only a scattered handful of travelers had left their home planets for Ghau-yei; but the planetary ports were growing.

"The people immigrating to Ghau-yei aren't from Coalition worlds," Shiro said.

"Actually," said Veronica. "I think they're the last Galra officers who served Zarkon."

" _What?_ "

She lifted her head, clear-eyed, unfaltering. "We rounded up most of the actually _evil_ ones—but Zarkon built up his army for millennia. Where do you think they ended up?"

Shiro laughed, a leaden rattle. "Honestly, I don't spend a lot of time wondering about Zarkon's soldiers."

"Right," said Veronica. Startlement lashed across her features, then regret, before she rinsed everything out. "Well, Ghau-yei was one of the first planets to break when the Empire started out. Over time, the Galra kind of started treating it as a waystation. There were always a couple officers who were too valuable to kill after they got wounded, or long-term political prisoners that had to be secured. A lot of them got dumped with the Ghau-yei. Most of the soldiers would leave when they got new assignments—but some of them came back. I'm pretty sure they were still living there at the end of the war."

The words shifted through him like a cold fantasy. To look into the sky and know that the war had been closed against you. To live in the dust after you'd seen the stars, under the gaunt sunsets of a planet that had only opened to you through conquest, and never ask for more.

"That explains the census data," Shiro said. The timeline was coming together, point by point, a story to match the figures shining from every monitor. "We know there has to be some Galra officers in hiding. They probably got used to thinking about Ghau-yei as a safe harbour. So they've been flying out over the last couple years as travel gets safer."

"Exactly. The Ghau-yei don't like trouble. A census overseen by one of the biggest presences in the Coalition means that they could spread the information that they're one of the bigger hubs around for Galra veterans—without making anyone think that it's a political statement."

She had told the story with care: its trim and simple timeline, its details overlapping with the echoes of her report. Giving him all the pieces of the answer that he needed to spare them both the question.

Shiro asked it, still. "What does any of this have to do with Curtis?"

Silence swayed between them like exhaust. "You left Curtis in charge," Veronica said. "He didn't want to let you down. When we flew in, I gave him the same data that I gave you. Curtis decided that we shouldn't take any chances. He had the MFEs circle the planet before he opened hailing frequencies."

He didn't need to think to see it: the coordination satellites and combat ships firing out in quartz colours, war-colours, wings shining with bladed intent. The chain of weapons, coiling over a voiceless planet. The surge of lights coming online across the firing line, a ballistic symphony, sounding out warnings to the world below.

"Why," Shiro said, "would he do that?"

"Because I warned him," Veronica said. Her jaw was set, her spine volcanic. "The Ghau-yei Cooperative announced that Earth would be coming about a week after we agreed to it. A year's a long time, even for a low-tech planet. Technically there was a danger that we'd be ambushed. Or the officers would try to slip away instead of letting the Ghau-yei tell us where they were."

"He didn't fire."

"No," Veronica said, with that distant, terrible lightness. "He didn't have any reason to."

No reason because the Atlas had cowed them. No reason because they'd never intended to move. It made no difference. Pilots, officers, flight crew alike—they'd moved on orders alone, linked in the cold, grinding mechanism of command.

"It wasn't _wrong_ ," Veronica said. "I didn't have enough of a profile on Ghau-yei culture to tell him how they'd take it for sure. And—"

"And he's your best friend."

Veronica looked at him, a gaunt, corroded look. "It's my fault."

"Your fault," said Shiro.

"Curtis was in my year, back in the day," Veronica said. Her voice lilted like an echo, a call from days long lost. "Our class was basically the standard set of cadets you always get. Most of them dreamed about making it to fighter-class. We didn't exactly hang out back then—but you could tell that Curtis was thinking about it, just like the rest of the guys he hung out with. 

"Then the exam results came out at the end of our second year. Neither of us had the scores for fighter-class. He knew that he could go into cargo-class and hope that a mission slot opened up. Or he could test into the communications track, and make officer in two years instead of three. Communications isn't anywhere as popular as science or piloting. If he made it, and people kept liking him, he'd get his pick of the prestige projects. So Curtis signed up for communications with me. We kept going; we graduated. And then," said Veronica, soft as ash, "Sam Holt came back from the dead. And we watched all of the best pilots in the Garrison burn out."

Even years couldn't drown out the memory. The flinch pulled through his shoulders, a reflex, a ghost sewn into his tendons and bones. Every three-star officer had been sent out to pay their respects in the months after the war. It had been one of his first duties after the war: to learn the script, and to take their grief. 

Much had survived the war; but when Shiro closed his eyes, it was still the memorial wall that rose through the dark. Cadets, captains, fighter-class pilots. All the children who'd left home to see the stars. All the stars that would never come back.

"You're saying he's not over the war," Shiro said.

Her hands stirred, a restless flurry, then fell. "I'm saying communications was never Curtis's first choice. Just _talking_? That wouldn't have gotten him to the end of the war. His biggest achievements happened when he was behind the Atlas's cannons."

She had looked like this before, he remembered: perched on the dresser of a medical ward, eyes as vague as glass, her smile slipping askew as Curtis strode into the room. 

_I know what my limits are._

Veronica knew herself; but she knew Curtis, too. They'd seen the earth razed, bodies crumbling like shrapnel, skies torn to ash, and they'd gone on together. Curtis had been with her in the year that the commanders scattered the news of her brother's disappearance. He'd stood at her station, and she at his. Day after day, when she couldn't go home, couldn't leave her comm-station, couldn't look away—still, she'd seen him. The sight of him must have held her like a luck charm: that the world would go on, and the war would end, if only Curtis survived with her.

Shiro called up the old reports. He sifted through them, line by line, as stars wheeled through the glass. It was easy to see the cracks in his absence, now that he knew to look. A call with a longstanding ally, closed out twenty minutes early, half the agenda tabled to the next session. A scheduled stopover turned holiday because the planet's emissaries wouldn't stir to meet with less than the Atlas's full diplomatic mission. The way Zh'cari had looked at them after a year's alliance, its warning as cold as clockwork. _We are not tyrants like the Galra. We do not cast our laws aside._ A tidepool of excuses, churning, each as thin and stale as saltwater.

"He couldn't have done anything else," Veronica said again. "You have to know that."

He knew. Curtis had been assigned to the Atlas cannons by military default. Iverson'd managed and settled the crew into their unyielding specialties. Shiro had driven them through the dying flares of the war; and when the ship was taken, Veronica'd been the first to catch him as he fell. Curtis hadn't cried out against the Galra, seeding messages of defiance across the stars; he hadn't smuggled supplies and led a rebellion back to humanity's last stand. But he'd held fast to his cannons, no matter the shots he'd missed. He'd answered every command asked of him.

Gentle, kind, trusting. He'd tried so hard to see Curtis clearly.

"I guess," said Shiro, "that rules him out for covering me this week."

A smile glinted at the corners of Veronica's mouth. "Hey, you could ask him. But no—I don't think he'd take it again."

She'd settled into her seat as he worked, and caught herself up in some project of her own. He watched as her shoulders bowed, as she flicked through three reports in a distracted procession and cast them back into the deeps of the ship's data-drives. Veronica hadn't been a pilot either. The Atlas had never transformed for her, never sung hymns of telemetry and fracturing light. She had learned the ship without the gift for it, day after day; she'd memorised its patterns with faith and practice.

"What about you?" Shiro said.

"Me?"

"You said it yourself," Shiro said. Her eyes were sharp, her mouth whipped into a line he couldn't read. "Iverson hates red tape. Curtis probably won't take command again. And no one runs a bureaucracy better than you do."

Her shoulders rolled, an uneasy wave. "Are you going after Keith?"

The question swayed between them, heavy with everything she'd left unspoken. Nothing had changed. Keith was still a Blade. He could lose himself in a wave of stars before Shiro found him. He hadn't needed Shiro on a mission in years. He didn't need anyone.

Shiro turned forward. A breath turned beneath his ribs. Under the stars, his veins were singing.

"I have to," he said. "Otherwise I'm never going to catch up."

  
  
  
  
  



	10. Chapter 10

  
  
  
  
  


Alone in a battered black ship, Shiro flew out to Vro-Seiira-Geo.

Hours flashed through him in heartbeats. He drifted through asteroid swarms and transmissions thrilling like radio static. Barriers sprang up and drew apart, billowing like silk. Through the hazy glass, starlight smeared into a halo. He glimpsed shrapnel—satellite parts like plated driftwood, and clouds, and continents rising out of the parched darkness like gold. He knew the shape of the land beneath him. Its towers prickling along the dunes, the crags and erratic fields that might have spiked the ship's unitary positioning system. The points where its rounded bluffs crumbled away. The gleam that looped along their heavy stones, trailing out through the endless plains.

 _There it is. Last natural water source on Vro-Seiira-Geo. Easiest landing spot left outside the capitol._

Farther out, the ocean-beds yawned vast and bare: shadows gleaming serpentine, a seam winding between the stones like a vein through the world.

He landed on a dark cliff. The ship sensors shrilled in a restless chorus, scanning the coalbed horizon. Exhaust clouded the monitors, milky and cool. Days ago, a ship had passed through the area. More than that, he couldn't guess. The traces were too thin, too scattered, to lead him anywhere.

But it didn't matter. Shiro looked out, and the land mapped itself under his gaze like a memory. Blockfields, stripped green peaks, and a dusty horizon.

Even here, even now, he knew where Keith would go.

Shiro set out, following the sounds of water. The twilight drew out; the lands rolled and fell. His footsteps scraped, heavy, as if through snow. Old memories whispered through his bones. The treachery of water and alien soil. A cave whistling with cold night. The reeking fire that he'd built inside the wind-weathered ribs of an old beast.

His history, and not his. The thought settled over him like ash. He'd flinched away from it once. Not now. He had carried the memories for this long, and he alone would carry them onwards—through the silence, the glassy dusk and the barren dunes, so like and unlike the lands that his ghost had crossed years ago.

It didn't matter who'd left those footprints, who'd won the war. Someday he might look back at those haunted paper days and piece them into something new. But he wasn't there yet. For now, it was enough to understand: he was all that was left of them both.

Shiro followed the river for an hour. He had just begun to feel the exhaust thickening in his muscles when the shores went curving out. The horizon broke across a rippling field of stars. Shiro breathed in, tasting the iron glimmer of Vro-Seiira-Geo's atmosphere and the ghost of saltwater.

He climbed down. A bony scout-ship had nestled amid the rocks, all spokes and battle-clipped wings. A shadow was crouching by its hull, drawing figures into a hologram, all of his dark-eyed focus pared into a single bladed point.

"Keith," Shiro said, reckless, rising. " _Keith._ "

The wind drew his voice ahead of him. Keith's head snapped up, a whipcord instinct—but Shiro was quicker: hurtling across the beach, legs pounding, heartbeat calling through the dark like a storm.

They caught each other halfway. Their shoulders jarred. A fist caught his spine like a blow. He was gasping, shuddering, bodies tangling with a desperation as fierce as gravity. "You're here," Keith was saying, harsh and dazed. "You're really here."

He couldn't laugh; he couldn't make a sound. Every vein was surging with the fever of Keith's voice. "You scared me," Shiro heard himself say, half-nonsensical. "Leaving like that."

"Then I guess we're even," Keith breathed, and kissed him.

The impact caught him like a comet. The universe could boil down to this moment, this fever, Keith's mouth urgent against his, fingers raking over skin. Each synapse and tendon of him kindling, thrilling, flooded with light. His throat hitched, his vision shimmered—but Keith was still crowding into him, and the rest of it was gone, lost to the rush of adrenaline and matching heartbeats. Knowing down to his marrows that no distance could ever come between them again. That this was his at last, his to keep.

The kiss broke. 

Shiro reached out, but caught only empty air. "I," Keith said. His brows twitched; his shadow dragged back along the stones. "I didn't mean to do that."

Shiro licked his lips, tasting salt. He felt the tightening bow of Keith's mouth, steps away, like an echo. "It's all right," he said, when he could speak. "Seeing you kind of surprised me, too."

The sand creaked. Keith's fist flexed against his thigh. "But that's not why you came," he said.

He turned away.

Shiro stared after him. Every inch of him was still drenched in sensation, static and oversaturation. The space between his ribs was a roar of stars. He had to speak, to explain—but the only sound left on his tongue was a name.

Wordless, he trailed Keith along the shore. A gold-eyed shadow blinked at him beneath the scout's heavy belly: the wolf, sprawled in judgment. Keith had retreated back to the cockpit. Dusk was pouring through the glass in a cascade of stars. The monitors were a tapestry of maps, all trading posts and inspection points, a dozen galaxies laid out in cosmic filigree. "Are you going to tell me how you got past the barriers?" he said.

The question plunged through the silence, clumsy as a cadet's first turn. He understood what it meant. "You've stolen more than a few of my rides over the years," Shiro said. He rolled a shoulder, settling against the doorframe. "I figured returning the favour was the least I could do. It got me all the way through planetfall with no problem."

Keith scrubbed at his nape. "Right," he said. "Everyone knows you're with me."

He must have been in the sun through the harshest hours of the day. Sand clung to his knuckles, his hair, a crown glittering with salt. In the rising night, he was flushed with life, filthy and warm and unreal. "They better," Shiro said, helpless, watching. "I'm always on your side."

He moved forward. Keith didn't turn his head; but his hands shifted along the console, making room. Shiro leaned in. The control panel was still warm where Keith's palm had rested against it. In the hush, he sifted through files, ticking through the steps of flight equations when Keith lost patience and flicked them aside. Every data-point kept in the databanks had some use. An outdated map for five galaxies around, gleaming with waystations whose names had been scrubbed out of later versions. Holoprint diagrams, scrawled with spidery labels, every borders stamped with a string of spatial coordinates. 

"This is Aaklir's work," Shiro said. He traced the jutting gate, the phase inducers, the manifold vacuum controls drawn intricate and strange. "You're putting down the infrastructure components for warp travel."

A hand closed over his. "Not infrastructure," Keith said. "It's just one gate."

The words tolled like a challenge. A warp-gate, in the singular, could be built cheap or stable. When forced past their limits, gates burst like supernovae, shockwaves and shrapnel seething out for light-years around. The Coalition had never struck down the construction of them; they hadn't needed to. There was no planet which didn't prize its own life above anything that might come through a gate.

In this, as with everything, Keith was telling him for a reason.

"You changed your mind," Shiro said.

 _Zethrid got a line on some of her old smuggling contacts,_ Keith had said in that crooked corridor. _Their travel circuit runs pretty close to the Veniwar system._

But a circuit drawn so close wouldn't need a warp-gate.

He caught Keith's eye. The impact seemed to startle him, electric-quick, clinging like a kiss. His lashes flinched; his knuckles ground against the dashboard. "Why're you here, Shiro?"

Shiro looked at him. The only language that Keith ever spoke was truth: whole, sharp, unflattering. He'd never understood anything else. Shiro'd known that before he came. He'd known it for years—since the sunrise resurrection, the deserted canyon. Standing in the raw dazzle of a Garrison afternoon, prickling all over with engine grease, sickness, the weight of a lifetime's dreaming.

 _Tell me the truth. Tell me what's wrong._

He'd flown across galaxies for this: an answer that he couldn't voice out loud.

Still, Shiro smiled. "I'm not here on behalf of the Coalition, Keith. Or the Atlas," he said. "I wanted to see you. That's all."

Keith breathed out. His eyes were dark, lips parted on a thought not quite taken. "Well," he said. "You're seeing me now."

 _Even if we do find him this time—you know it's going to happen again._

Whatever Veronica had meant, that part had struck true. He could see Keith today, tomorrow, and all the days after. None of it would matter if he didn't stay. He couldn't live like that, toiling in the shadow of a loss yet to come.

But he wasn't there yet.

"I sure am," Shiro said, and stepped forward. His steel hand slid over Keith's spine; and part of him, nameless, greedy, savored the tension that thrummed into his spreading fingers. "But that doesn't mean you've shown me everything. Come on."

Together they turned to the doors.

  
  
  
  
  


They struck up a fire under the stars.

Dusk had broken into a radiant night. Shiro fed fuel-shards to the nesting flames as Keith scraped through his holograms. Smoke rose: ashless, colourless. The dark sang with the crackling savour of cooking rations. Constellations came skimming through the celadon sky.

They didn't speak. Around them, the world seemed to move like a frame slipped loose from the film-reel of a dream. The dunes murmured; the lake swayed lush and green as glass, sighing its secrets into the arch of the shore. In a daze, Shiro settled back, watching the glow of the mission arrays spangling through Keith's hair.

"Vro-Seiira launched the gate-station about a month ago," Keith was saying, and Shiro started. "They've been building it out ever since then. It sounds like they've got everything planned out—fuel budgets, maintenance schedules, launch training. The only thing left's to test how it works."

"Makes sense," said Shiro at last. His hands flexed at his sides, steel and guilty flesh. "How're the simulations looking?"

Keith jerked his chin. "Aaklir's been sending me the trial data. Looks like it should hold for at least a year."

 _Aaklir._ A question rolled in his teeth like lead; it crumbled as he looked at Keith. "I didn't know you were talking to xir," said Shiro.

Keith hunched into himself, legs folding, bowed over a waystation which gleamed with facets like a sea-wave. "I wasn't," he said. Then: "Zethrid set up a meeting point. We were on our way there when we got a signal from Vro-Seiira-Geo. It turns out they've been broadcasting a deal into local airspace. Anyone who passes by can take them up on it."

"Anyone."

"Yeah," said Keith, grimacing at the pitted maps. "They knew the kind of people they'd be getting."

Privateers, deserters, scavengers who could strip an abandoned camp down to bone in a fistful of hours. Shiro leaned back on a hand. "Is it bad?"

"I'm—not sure." The words shifted on Keith's tongue, all uneasy shrapnel. "The broadcasts stopped after I told them I was coming down. Xe sent me a couple reports when I landed. I've been going through them since then. It sounds like the whole factory's been working together to get this gate launched."

Shiro looked at him. The shape that Keith made by firelight: his long, coiled hair, the turn of his shoulder, the stroke of his jawline carving through the dark. His throat worked; but he couldn't finish the thought. "Sounds like you showed up just in time," he said.

Praise, as always, drew out Keith's restlessness. He doused the screens, turned his head. "I got the signal from Acxa a couple hours ago," he said. "There's a planet a couple systems away that's willing to trade for equipment as long as Vro-Seiira-Geo handles the transportation. We'll probably head out in the morning, once the signal clears."

"'We'," said Shiro. He didn't misunderstand. "You're waiting for Aaklir."

Keith twitched his fingers, unseeing. "Well," he said, low as a mission report. "Xe asked me to."

There was no sentiment in the words—nothing but a clean equation, faultless as rust, fire, dissolution. An action, a reaction. Someone asked for help, and so Keith came. It had always been that simple.

"If it's just flying," Shiro said. "I can handle it."

"What?"

He couldn't have been sure with anyone else; but he knew Keith. He always had. The want of him; the fury of wanting. The heartbeat that gleamed between his ribs like scales settling into balance. "You want to make things right for Vro-Seiira-Geo," Shiro said. Each word broke through him, bruising and sure. "But the work isn't everything. Right? Having someone who needs you, agreeing that you'll help them—none of that means you have to forgive what they've done. Don't give away more of yourself than xe's asking for, Keith."

His voice tolled across the clearing. The fire leapt and hissed.

"Right," Keith said; but he'd glanced back again. His mouth bent, a rueful softness. He shifted close. Their shoulders knocked together in a familiar toast. "Thanks for the ancient wisdom, old-timer."

He didn't flinch; he didn't lean in. His shoulder ached with stillness, raw as a touched nerve and something that could not be named. "What else's an old man good for?" Shiro said.

He felt his mistake at once. Their arms brushed, tensing; the air stirred like kerosene. 

But Keith only tipped his head up. "I keep thinking about what you said before," he said to the constellations. "About how—even if the lions came back, we wouldn't be paladins anymore."

Shiro swallowed. He understood the echo for what it was: not a detour but an answer. "I didn't mean it the way it came out."

"Yeah," said Keith. "You did."

Sparks coiled between them, withering into shadows. "Keith," Shiro said, and stopped again. Keith was looking at him: hard-drawn, firelit. There was no shield against it.

"The lions chose us for a reason," Keith said. His voice held steady, a long-lost ghost from a plain flooded with stars. "It wasn't just because we were around. Or because we were convenient. Years ago, they saw something in us that made us worthy paladins. That hasn't changed for me. And I know it hasn't for you."

Fury tore through him—a throb, a whirlwind of fever, the silence of years crushed down to a blinding gasp. His throat crackled, shaking, electric. He couldn't speak. What would he have said? What did it matter? It was easy to invent stories about the lions of Voltron now that they were gone.

And still: he remembered. Memory moved through him like a wave. The Black Lion's console, fanned around him like a landing shore. The way her static had guided him across the controls: teaching him how to move with her shields, her filtered telemetry, into an age-old war and all the way through. The gravity of her presence in the abyss, drawing stars in spirals through the void. All the galaxies he'd seen, settling like a vast anchor in the sea of her cosmic memory. Holding him fast; holding his place. Dreaming the universe for him until he was ready to wake again.

"You can't," Shiro said. His fists flexed. He breathed, and breathed. "You can't know that, Keith."

The hush glittered between them. A hand settled over his, fingers mapping the steel grooves of his knuckles.

Simply, Keith said: "I know you."

His head jerked away. Silence grated in his teeth. There were a hundred questions that he might have asked in the moment, words with their sharp edges turned outward. _what do you know about me? How can you be sure? If you know me, then tell me what I want._

_What did I ever want?_

But it wasn't Keith's answer he needed.

He'd known once; he must have known. But when Shiro reached back, the first memory that rose was the morning after the war. Sunlight cracking the hollow shadows scattered across the floor. The only living signs in the room were his alone: his footsteps, his heartbeat, his skin prickling with the static of his ship as he moved across his suite, dressing for the first meeting of the Voltron Coalition in peacetime.

He'd gone on, never slowing, never turning from a mission. Alone, he'd lit incense and candles for a wake; he'd settled his own chrysanthemum stems before a headstone in an island graveyard. Day after day, he'd stood in the bridge, sifting through the constellations for the next mission, feeling the ache in his throat fading with every mile and beat. 

"You know," Shiro said. "I had a couple late nights in the Atlas when I first started flying. I used to wake up in the morning, thinking that I fell asleep in Black's cockpit."

"Is that why you stayed?"

"It's not the only reason." His fists flexed; the tightness shimmered between his ribs like a mirage. "I'm not sure how to explain it. When I was piloting the Atlas, it felt almost like having the Black Lion again. I had some new controls to learn, new functions to adapt to—but we were on the same side. It needed a pilot as much as I needed to fly, and that was all we had to be. I wasn't chosen. I didn't have to be," he laughed, " _a born leader who's in control at all times, someone whose men will follow without hesitation._ I didn't have to live up to a _destiny_. You have no idea how badly I needed that, Keith. How badly I wanted to be—"

Shiro stopped.

"You wanted to be someone new," Keith said.

Someone who could fight, who could smile, who could live without faltering. Someone who'd put his damaged days behind him.

He thought of his wedding day. Hothouse flowers, pastel lights, confetti bursting from paper horns. In the hour before the festival began, he'd dressed himself slowly in the admiral's suite: a slender shirt, polished shoes, white silk gleaming with a clarity that had never known cannonfire. In those bright cuffs and buttoned jacket, he'd felt different, minted new, armoured against all the days that had come before. Peace had come at last. Grief was just one more war wound that he could bandage and seal away.

He'd thought for so long that he'd understood. He had done everything right; he'd done everything that could be asked of a survivor. He'd turned away from grief, settled, and moved on. And still, given the chance, he'd torn through galaxies to make it out here. To this new mission, this world in need, and a heart which knew his down to the core.

The war was over. The lions were gone. But after all this time, he was still a paladin.

Shiro turned his head. His fingers flexed, rilling over with starlight. "Think your ship's big enough to fit three people?" he said.

Keith's gaze flickered. "Are you coming?"

There had been days when the idea would've been a settled thing—sure as a blade in its sheath, a feather prickling from an arched wing. But there was no grudge in Keith's eyes as he looked back, armoured in red light, clear-eyed, as if he were mapping back every shape that Shiro'd ever been. In paladin armour, in his Garrison jacket. His shoulders heavy with a champion's muscle. Seeing down to the want and fury and unforgiving joy of him, the starlight that must have been lashed into his veins from birth.

His pulse drummed in his ears, rising like a ship's song.

"Yeah," Shiro said. "I am."

  
  
  
  
  


They ate, and talked, poring over the maps until the fire drooped in its nest. The matter of the bounty stirred briefly, but was dismissed; no ship could hope to take Keith in this kind of flight. The path to Rgl-Tzan was an easy sweep—a curve from the warp-gate to the system star. They'd catch its orbit, swing around and out, ride its momentum for a half-day out to their destination. The scout-ship had a habit of burning its fuel in reckless gulps; but even its rusted, uneasy engines couldn't tear through a whole propellant tank in that faint distance. They would stay as long as they needed to see the deal through, and then they'd fly back. In two days, it'd be over.

Everything would be over.

("Rgl-Tzan," Keith said to the holo-displays, fiercely tense, practicing the gurgling inflection. His frown deepened. "Rgl-Tzan. _Rgl-Tzan_."

"Really hard to eat when you're making that noise," said Shiro, and gravely passed him a ration-skewer.)

He fell asleep in spite of himself, and woke to a spindrift dawn. Light sifted through the seafoam clouds, green and faraway as a deepening tide. They had collapsed in the cockpit somewhere in the night. Machines were still drawling and churning with data; the mission grids strained like nets against the lashing morning. 

Outside, a clank struck the hull.

Shiro yawned, looking over. Keith had folded himself into the second pilot's seat like a perched cat. His shoulders hunched under a thorny shiver. His jaw was set with dreaming, delicate intent. The bow of his spine was a question.

Shiro clasped his arm. His warmth clung to Shiro's fingertips as he went out. 

It was early still. Around him, the shore lay bare and dreaming. The second sun was still a drowsy curve along the horizon. Light was tangling through the thin, roping clouds, winding their dewy secrets along the dunes.

Shiro cocked his head. His lashes swept down. "Keith's still sleeping," he told the air. "So I'd appreciate it if you'd keep this ambush quiet. All right? I'm closing my eyes for five seconds. After that, I'll head back in. Five. Four—"

A shadow flashed through his eyelids.

Shiro twisted, and lunged. His arms cinched. Feathers slid and squirmed through his grip—gold and violet, flashing fury. A yelp burred down his ribs, and his fists tightened.

"Rude!" Aaklir seethed, coiling and lashing. Shiro counted off three jolts before he bent to set Aaklir down. "Tsih, tsih. Who sleeps so late, eh!"

"Most of the universe," Shiro said, "actually."

"If most of the universe were coming to us, we would not be having such a problem," Aaklir retorted. Xe tweaked at xir shoulders, all bristling dignity. Somewhere in the dunes, he heard the hiss like a breeze rising, then scattering, a trail as thin as footsteps. "You are here, so you must abide by the planet's conventions. Everybody knows that you cannot do proper business when the sky is boiling."

"Based on the last visit I had," Shiro said, "Vro-Seiira-Geo also goes in for formal greetings. I don't think trying to jump on my head counts."

A little silence swept over his echoes. "Eh, well," said Aaklir, voice milding like a songbird's. "There is no entry-bell on your ship. And could I bang at the door like a soldier? No, no, no. So you see, my options for bringing you out to greet me were truly very few."

He'd meant to be stern; but Aaklir had a thrush's sense for tones, coaxing and childish and sweet all at once. Shiro smiled, as he saw he was meant to do. "Waiting _is_ pretty overrated," he said, a little dry. "I guess you're ready to get going."

"Eh, I was ready an apogee ago," said Aaklir. "It is only that the circumstances were wrong before. Are you going to be my pilot, then?"

The words flew one after another. Months ago, he might have taken it for nerves, mirth, curiosity; but he understood it now. "Keith's inside," Shiro said, and watched xir ruff settle. "Like I said. You got here a little earlier than we expected."

Aaklir rocked on xir heels. Xe stroked xir collar, a touch that sang along the chitin sheath. A little stud glittered beneath xir claw like crystal. "Tsah," xe said, but without conviction. "It is good luck for Keithlir that you travel with him. With you at his side, speaking in such a way, he will always look good by comparison."

Change came slowly. Aaklir still spoke in the same way that a bell would cast off music: reckless with xir graces, trilling like struck glass. But there was still something new about xir—more than xir new, polished soldier's jacket, or the footsteps of a ghost through the dunes. It was a sense of control, a consequence. The halo of a world around xir restless shadow.

Shiro shifted his weight. "I'm here because I got lucky," he said, steering Aaklir towards the ship doors. "I told you that the Coalition wouldn't intervene with Vro-Seiira-Geo. No matter what happens, we're keeping that promise. Whatever happens in the next couple days, no one in the Coalition's going to know."

"The way you say things," Aaklir said, light as a look, "it sounds as if you are trying to do favours for me. We have signed no treaties with Earth, Admiral. What do we matter to the great Voltron Coalition?"

"'We'," said Shiro. "Does Vro-Seiira-Geo know what happened to the terraforming shipment?"

Silence drifted around them, warm as the surf that broke after a wave. Aaklir cocked a brow. The glint of xir eye could have charred open a new desert. " _The war we waged is over, and the dead will not forgive us_ ," xe said, thin beneath the dazzling. " _At the end of the day, nothing will ever change who we are._ Do you remember those words?"

"I do," said Shiro.

"Perhaps it is true. Perhaps not. In either case, it is no good for anybody to spend all their lives chasing forgiveness. If we are to be people, then it is our duty to lessen the hurts we have caused, and to bring to life all the good that is in us. So Seiir has decreed."

"Seiir."

They passed out of the daylight. The echo caught on his tongue, a flurry of sparks, and memory came flaring after it. _Vesh supports Earth's motion to have Vro-Seiira-Geo, once known as the free planet Seiira, recognised as an independent planet beyond the Coalition's authority._

"What is a name if not the best kind of promise?" Aaklir said. Xir voice floated through the narrow hall like a chorus of secrets. " So, so. All past crimes are forgiven on Seiir. All that we are asked in turn is that we live with kindness. We are not truly people yet; but still, we can try to be _ir_ to each other."

 _Ir_. He shaped the syllable, lips and throat and teeth. _Seiir. Keithlir. Aaklir._ "Sorry. I don't think it's translating."

"Eh, that is all right, Adm- _ir_ -al," Aaklir said, with luminous mockery. "It is not for you."

But xe stopped at the threshold. Over the arm of the pilot's seat, they could see Keith's head prickling black and dreaming in the lucid light.

Aaklir shifted. The cockpit lights swept across the embroidered flourish of xir jacket, and all the pieces clicked into place. The slashed sleeves, the violet hem. The shape of a new name on xir tongue. Xe had come for the mission dressed in Daq colours, wearing the factory sigil that they'd seen scrawled on all the lost ruins on the way to the water.

Shiro drew xir back from the doors. "Thanks for coming out," he said. "On behalf of Seiir."

Aaklir stiffened, and swept back. "But you cannot say that yet," xe said, even as xir spine frilled with pride. "You have not even seen what I have brought for trading!"

"If it's small enough to fit inside this ship," Shiro said, "I'm not sure you're going to get the reaction you want. I've seen a lot."

Without a word, they'd moved together into a shared conspiracy. Their voices fell, banked like embers; not a breath crossed the threshold. "You are being tricky, Admiral," Aaklir said, hands flicking xir cheerful scorn. "That is also _very_ rude."

But xe knelt, beckoning Shiro down as xe flicked through xir pockets. Across the scuffed paneling of the hall, xe began to sketch out a maze of wire and fractal designs. "We are going to ask for a future," xe said. "No price could be enough to pay for that. But I can give what I have."

The makeshift projector fired into the air: a spear of light. Shapes rose out of the dazzling—wireframe diagrams tangled with hand-scrawled notes. Encrypted ansible communicators. A super-charging station for ships which could be converted away from standard fuels. A collapsible container whose vast, tensile walls could be shuffled and fused into any number of guises, each of them unbreakable: a stage, the hollow floor of a room, an armoured trunk that might be folded into itself to survive an ion blast.

Shiro stopped at the last diagram. His fingers trailed through its steely pixellation. "You've had this design for a while," he said, slowly.

"Of course! It was one of the very first that we brought to Seiir with us."

"And what happens," said Shiro, "after you fold the armour over something? How long would you need to get the shipment out again?"

Aaklir stilled. 

He'd had more than one reason to visit the Siuegir's loft; but Aaklir'd had equal cause to open their doors. It was the career trick of every magician, diplomat, and engineer: presenting simplicity as if it were honesty. Showing him an empty steel floor in a stone tower. Ropes drawn through the pearled morning. the Siuegir strung like birds across every strand, bright and watchful. Knowing that he would never think to ask for what they might be guarding.

"Do you think it makes an unsuitable gift?" Aaklir said.

Shiro looked at xir: the rounded shoulders, the feathers slicked down along xir nape like carven jade, dressed in the last, shining favours of a starving world. Looking at xir, you could not imagine a single harm rising out of those idealist's hands, that artless hummingbird gaze.

It must have taken time to forge that look: trials, desperation, exile. It might mean everything; it might mean nothing at all. But this much he understood: after everything that xe had survived, in the months xe'd had to weigh the risks—still Aaklir had come miles across the dunes, carrying the hopes of a new world.

"Don't worry about what I think," Shiro said, low and clear. "We've come this far for Seiir. Nothing's going to stop us."

  
  
  
  
  


They rose as the second sun broke the waterline. Shiro woke Keith as Aaklir went to investigate and diagnose the ship's battered console. ("Are you truly, truly certain that this lug shall fly?") His fingers swept over the slope of Keith's shoulder, lingering along the sleepy, tender flex of his jaw. His head bent, mouth close enough to graze skin.

"Ergl-Zan," Shiro whispered.

At once, an elbow jolted into his gut. "Rgl-Tzan. _Rgl-Tzan_ ," Keith said, bleary and blinking. He straightened in his seat with a scowl as Shiro went staggering backwards. "Shiro? What—why would you _do_ that."

"Thought it'd be a fast way to wake you up," Shiro said, palming his own ribs with some rue. "Remind me not to get any more bright ideas."

Keith yawned, a drowsy, canine snap. He was smiling as he stretched towards the controls. "Like anyone could stop you."

The morning melted into a flurry. They secured the few instruments they'd scattered across the shore to camp, and took off as radiance began to unwind through the jeweled sky. The atmosphere bristled around them, searing, howling, an apocalyptic flare—and then they were out, tearing into the flooding stars.

By wordless agreement, Keith handled the warp-gate checks. Shiro went to keep Aaklir company at the back of the cabin as the stars warped and darkened through the glass. "Have you been through one of these before?"

"A few times," said Aaklir. Xe folded xir wrists, one over the other. The projector was still glowing at xir knee, a branding halo. "Never alone."

On the beach, in the half-light, he couldn't have guessed what lay behind that glossy archness; but the watchful set of xir spine was an easy line to read. "You didn't have to come alone this time," Shiro said. Pretty sure the ship wouldn't have cracked under the weight of a few more delegates."

"Ah! Truly, you are a pilot—you and Keithlir both. All of you believe that the laws of physics have mercy." But Aaklir cocked xir head. "Will it reflect poorly on the mission, that I have come alone?"

"Not poorly," said Shiro. "These deals just take some strategy, that's all. My standard delegation's seven people. We have a few officers on staff whose job're memorising the talking points based on our planet profiles."

"But you represent the Earth," said Aaklir, mirror-eyed. "Your deals are with other worlds of similar size. Seiir, now, has fewer than five hundred thousand in the factory. That is even if you count the younglirs. Should I have asked them to risk themselves for a deal with a pebble?"

"Going by my vast diplomatic experience," Shiro said, "I'd kind of recommend that you avoid calling any planet you want to deal with a pebble."

Aaklir clicked xir claws, curving neat as prayer-beads. "You know what I mean! We are looking into an expansion on the factory hydroponics system to support a greater range of nutrients. I have told my engineers to work with Vro-Seiira's guards to train the citizens. We must have people who know how to operate the manufacturing additions as soon as they are in place." Xe smiled, a clear, practiced curve. "There is so much to do. Of course I was easiest to spare."

 _Easiest_. Nothing could be easy on a world still processing its own survival. But that was the secret shared by every trickster, ruler, and revolutionary: if there was a difference between a feat and a miracle, it was nothing they would ever admit. Xe had come to a strange planet and nearly broken it in a handful of months. Xir people flung themselves into thin air at a single command. Over and over, xir voice alone had drawn Keith across the stars.

But story-telling was a part of survival, too.

"I guess," Shiro said aloud, "Vro-Seiira must be busy."

Aaklir scoffed. "The people around her are busy. Vro-Seiira only drowns in her own work because she makes it so. That forgemaker cannot give up her own work, even for a centiday! Before a thing can be changed, ten people must go to her to complain about it. She has had to promote a nest of people just to sort out the complainers into the correct departments. Oh," xe added, with gaudy disinterest. "Her Daq friend is Minister of Intergalactic Respectives now. Or a deputy, or something. And of course he got to put in some of _his_ friends."

 _Her Daq friend_. But that was not the first thing that xe had called Qival. The voice of a ghost beat down to the roots of his teeth, an echo from uglier days. 

Shiro swallowed the words. He said, "What about you?"

Aaklir turned xir head; xir smile flashed like a cogwheel's edge. "Of course, I am nobody. _Nobody_ could get done the things that I do, you see."

"Funny," said Shiro. "If you ever think she's being unfair to you—"

"Can a cathode be unfair to an anode?" Xir laughter drew along the walls, metallic and chiming. At the controls, Keith's shoulders shifted, then settled. "Tsah, poor admiral. I have power enough not to worry. If you do not trust my word on it, then trust Vro-Seiira. I mean only this: I am not generous enough to carve pieces of myself away as Vro-Seiira does."

Shiro's gaze swept over xir; but there was no malice in xir brimming ruff or the sway of xir wrists. "You made it sound like she was handling herself."

Aaklir flung xirself back against xir seat, careless down to the curl of xir sigh. "Eh, do not take so over it. Vro-Seiira would handle herself if you dropped her in a volcano. She only has a few complaints, now and then. Our flimsy tables, our poor windows."

"The—tables?"

"Tsah." This too was dismissed in the flick of a wrist. "She remembers the days when she was only a smith, that is all. It has been many years since the factory was converted to hydroponic support, and she took command for her factory. This is not the work for which she was honed."

Memory filtered back to him as if through strong light: Vro-Seiira's heavy knuckles dragging along the edges of tables; the flat, gaudy nails she'd worn so as not to scratch holoprints with her scarred fingers. But brighter than that, there was the memory of the Siuegir's loft: holoprints on every wall of dazzling networks, adaptive collimator lenses, decentralised records of interstellar supply chains. 

Given ten years, the only factories left on Seiir would be artifacts, touchstones, fossils.

"Maybe someday," Shiro said in spite of himself, "when things slow down … she'll get back to it."

Aaklir laughed again, pitiless and thrilled at the joke. "Have you ever known the universe to slow down? If the system is not everything that we need it to be by the time we are finished, then we have built the wrong system! It will never truly be _her_ factory again. But she will be happy enough, in the end," xe added. The lights flicked on, points filtering into an infinite constellation, as the ship drifted into the warp-gate. "We have all come to the places where we are needed most."

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~~apologies for the delay on this chapter. after some thought, i'd like to take a month to polish the last few sections. thank you for sticking around so far, and i'll see you on **feb. 21, 2021**.~~
> 
> **feb. 21, 2021** : things are a little unusual for me, currently. i'm not sure when i'll be able to post the final chapters, but i hope to do it all at once rather than stretch things out any further. feedback isn't necessary, either to encourage or to discourage this process -- i'll finish my edits when i have time again. until then, i apologise for adding to your list of Unfinished WIPs.


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